Marketers: You've Heard of Machine Learning, But What Is It?

In 2004, at the end of a long day of classes, I was putting in some extra hours in my school's computer lab perfecting my latest project: Acey Deucey. A program powered using my crude understanding of the Visual Basic coding language, this program felt alive to me. Not just because I'd created an interface that looked sort of like a first grader's drawing of a third-rate casino, but because it was a game that users could play against the computer. It wasn't machine learning--but to me, it sure felt intelligent. I sat before the screen, testing and retesting the code, and feeling almost exactly like Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein: "No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world."