Teaching Self-Learning Machines to Forget

Many tasks in which humans excel are extremely difficult for robots and computers to perform. Especially challenging are decision-making tasks that are non-deterministic and, to use human terms, are based on experience and intuition rather than on predetermined algorithmic response. A good example of a task that is difficult to formalize and encode using procedural programming is image recognition and classification. For instance, teaching a computer to recognize that the animal in a picture is a cat is difficult to accomplish using traditional programming. Artificial intelligence (AI) and, in particular, machine learning technologies, which date back to the 1950s, use a different approach.