With a little technological magic, this dad build a sorting hat straight out of Harry Potter

Machine learning represents a paradigm shift in programming, there's no doubt. The concept has begun to weave its promising tendrils through everything from Facebook's image software to Gmail's spam filter, but a crafty engineer thought up a better use: a real-life sorting hat inspired by the character in J.K. Rowlings's beloved Harry Potter series. The impetus for project lead Ryan Anderson, a tech hobbyist by night and a solutions architect for IBM by day, was a creation that would entertainingly instill in a young audience the importance of math, technology, and science. "I was thinking of fun projects and, coincidentally, I have a couple of daughters, and they are mad keen on'Harry Potter,'" he told Tech Insider. "They've read the books, like, five times."