Machine Learning Essay

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This essay is going to define machine learning and describe some of the different areas within machine learning. It will summarise some of the algorithms used to achieve machine learning and describe some of the situations in which they can be applied, then compare these to human learning techniques and comment on there similarities and differences. It will then discuss Raymond Kurzweils singularity theories and its opposing views. Intro Machine learning is having a large impact on the way that computers can be used in many ways. There are many implementations that vary in complexity. Google finishing off sentences when a search term is entered (Economist,2014)and Netflix having the ability to recommend films that you may enjoy to IBM's cognitive computing program 'Watson' that has beaten human opponents on jeopardy. The area is constantly growing, Facebook have recently invested in their own Artificial Intelligence (A.I) team that are working on extracting the emotions and behaviour implied by posts to its site (Simonite,2013) and IBM are investing one billion dollars in a new division to find uses for Watson (Economist,2014). Google have seen the importance of A.I and machine learning which can be seen by the number of artificial intelligence companies that they have purchased. They have just added to there portfolio of recent A.I related purchases with the acquisition of Deep Mind which they purchased for a reported four hundred million pounds. This is impressive to say that Deep Mind had not even released a product at this point. (Bradshaw et al, 2014) There is very little known about what deep minds technology is capable of but it is known to be in the area of general machine learning algorithms. It has been said that De... ... middle of paper ... ... of the brain its self. His reasons for scepticism are that the human consciousness is a result of non linear interactions between the billions of cells that make up the human body. However Nicolellis believes that computing technology will be implanted into our brains to improve brain function before a computing system that can re create human consciousness is possible. (Regelado,2014)Nicollelis's Duke Lab have recently published a study that has demonstrated a way to allow rats to see infra red light. They achieve this by wiring an infra-red sensor to electrodes implanted into a section of the brain called the somatosensory cortex. This is the first experiment that has successfully used a neural implant to give an animal a new sense.(Thomson et al ,2014) This shows that Nicollelis is serious with his claims and that his opposition to kurzweils claims carry weight.

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