The simplest answer is to make our lives easier. In the early days of “INTELLIGENT” APPLICATIONS, many systems used hardcoded rules of “if” and “else” decisions to process data or adjust the user input. Think of a spam filter whose job is to move the appropriate incoming email messages to a spam FOLDER.  

But with the machine learning algorithms, we are given ample information for the data to learn and identify the patterns from the data.

Unlike the NORMAL problems we don’t need to write the new rules for each problem in machine learning, we just need to use the same workflow but with a different dataset.

Let’s talk about Alan Turing, in his 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, Alan asked, “Can machines think?”

Full paper here

The paper describes the “Imitation Game”, which includes three participants -

• Human acting as a judge,
• Another human, and
• A computer is an ATTEMPT to convince the judge that it is human.

The judge asks the other two participants to talk. While they respond the judge needs to decide which response came from the computer. If the judge could not tell the difference the computer won the game.

The test continues today as an annual competition in artificial intelligence. The aim is simple enough: convince the judge that they are chatting to a human instead of a computer chatbot program.