Wikipedia's ML primer: Samuel 1959 to Vaswani's 2017 transformer
TL;DR
- Wikipedia defines machine learning as a field of AI studying statistical algorithms that learn from data and generalize to unseen data without explicit programming.
- IBM's Arthur Samuel coined the term 'machine learning' in 1959, with Donald Hebb's 1949 neural theory sitting earlier in the lineage.
- The page anchors the modern deep-learning arc with AlexNet in 2012 and Ashish Vaswani's Transformer architecture in 2017.
The Wikipedia entry on machine learning opens with the line most working practitioners will recognize as the standard working definition: a field of AI concerned with "statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without being explicitly programmed." It credits IBM's Arthur Samuel with coining the term in 1959, with Donald Hebb's 1949 neural theory sitting earlier in the lineage and the modern arc running through Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton's 2012 AlexNet to Ashish Vaswani's 2017 Transformer architecture.
The judgment is carried by Tom M. Mitchell's formal definition, which the page quotes verbatim: "A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E."
Two researchers we track pointed at this page this week, a reminder that the canonical primer still circulates among practitioners even as the field moves past the milestones it enumerates.
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Originally reported by en.wikipedia.org
Read the original article →Original headline: Machine learning - Wikipedia