Simply put, any algorithm that has the ability to learn on its own, given a set of data, without having to program the rules of the domain explicitly, falls under the ambit of Machine Learning. This is different from Data Analytics or Expert systems where, rules, logic, propositions or activities has to be manually coded by an expert programmer. Systems which has ability to learn on its own and progress towards a pre-defined goal, without much of human intervention can be broadly termed as Intelligent Systems. The quality of intelligence can range from an amoeba, algae, ant, armadillo all the way to chimps, humans or beyond. As an example, systems which interact with humans in natural language cannot be built by coding the rules and conversational logic of human language.

Simply put, any algorithm that has the ability to learn on its own, given a set of data, without having to program the rules of the domain explicitly, falls under the ambit of Machine Learning. This is different from Data Analytics or Expert systems where, rules, logic, propositions or activities has to be manually coded by an expert programmer. Systems which has ability to learn on its own and progress towards a pre-defined goal, without much of human intervention can be broadly termed as Intelligent Systems. The quality of intelligence can range from an amoeba, algae, ant, armadillo all the way to chimps, humans or beyond. As an example, systems which interact with humans in natural language cannot be built by coding the rules and conversational logic of human language.

Learning is the most important ability and attribute of a Intelligent System. A system which acquires knowledge by experience, trial-and-error or through coaching, exhibits early traces of intelligence. This post explains how ANNs learn. In the previous post, 'Layman's Intro to AI', we explored a simple analogy of how a Artificial Neural Network or ANN gains to understand the'knowledge weight' of a Cat (or what we termed as the Catiness). 'w' is the knowledge weight that the network needs to learn (about the Catiness of a Cat) The '*' operator is a function called the Activation Function, which was introduced in the post titled "Mathematical foundation for Activation Functions".