What Is Machine Learning And Why Is It Important? – On Coding

At the end of 2016, it's hard to escape the cultural influence of artificial intelligence. The biggest company in the world is publicly staking its future on it; Seoul came to a standstill to watch their best Go player lose to it; and millions of people have tuned in to see what HBO think it might mean for the future of humanity. To understand its implications -- and they're big -- it's helpful to understand what it is and how it works. People tend to use machine learning and artificial intelligence as if they're interchangeable, but they're not: rather, machine learning (ML) is one very successful approach to the broader field of artificial intelligence (AI). Artificial intelligence is, essentially, the simulation of intelligence in computers.