How to make machines smart
Just like humans, AI can do practically nothing before being trained. In fact, taking a look at how we humans learn, we start to understand how to make machines smart. Roughly put, we acquire skills and knowledge either implicitly or explicitly. Implicit learning, or learning by doing, takes place when small children learn their first language or learn to swim. Explicit knowledge, on the other hand, is acquired from rules, tables, vocabulary lists, descriptions, instructions, etc. This is how we learn foreign languages or algebra. Implicit and explicit knowledge often mix, for example when learning to drive a car, where we need to display both theoretical and practical understanding.
Similarly and, again, roughly speaking, AI systems acquire their ability to act intelligently either via rules, schemes, formulas, etc., or by deriving patterns from data. This ...