Machine Learning 101: How Computers Learn Without Being Told What to Do

Machine Learning 101: How Computers Learn Without Being Told What to Do Machine learning (ML) is the secret sauce behind AI’s biggest wins right now. Unlike traditional programming, where you write every rule by hand, ML lets computers figure things out by learning from data. Think about how Netflix knows you’ll love that obscure sci-fi flick or how your spam filter catches those sketchy emails—that’s ML at work, and it’s changing everything. For Non-Techies : Imagine teaching a kid to recognize dogs by showing them hundreds of dog pics instead of describing every breed. That’s ML in a nutshell: feed a computer data, and it spots patterns on its own. There are two main flavors: supervised learning, where you give it labeled data (like “this is a dog, this is a cat”), and unsupervised learning, where it finds patterns without any hints (like grouping similar shoppers). It’s why Amazon suggests products you didn’t even know you wanted or why Google Translate is getting scarily good. For ...