Human vs Machine Learning – for kids – Part I

This weekend, I was reading some articles about Machine Learning and was trying some hands-on, which my 10 year old boy noticed and starting firing his curious questions. 🙂

His first few questions after looking the topic were “What is Machine Learning ? and how can machine learn as it is not alive ? “

And I started thinking how to make him understand this interesting topic in layman terms.

I thought to start with a collaborative comparison, between human and machine, to make him realize, what are basic differences between two and how Machine Learning help computers to be smart, in some limited use cases.

I asked him, “how we as human learn things, and he answered by reading, watching, touching and brain helps process that information.”

I stopped him and asked, “how do you know when you looked at some object first time, about it’s name, shape, color ? For example – if you looked at a car, how do you know, that it is a car, of model Odyssey and of white color?”

He took few seconds and said “I know that this is a car, and I can read it’s name and see it’s color”

I asked him again, to “think like he is looking at any kind of car first time and don’t know about cars as subject.”

and he said “it will be you or mom, will tell me that this is a Car, of white color and what it is used for.”

and I asked, what will happen when you see similar object again “I can say that this is a car”

He got the point, what I am trying to establish 🙂

I asked him to continue and name our senses, which work like input/output sensors to our brain. (We will touch sensors more in next part.)

He started naming them as below :

Till now we have established, that there are some senses which act like input for human’s brain, using which brain do some processing, but it also need some guidance to process that information to establish some facts.

Now it is turn to know, how a machine do similar things and act smart.

I will cover that part in Part II of this topic 🙂

I hope this will help your little ones to understand this complex subject and inspire them to research more in this direction 🙂

Will catch you soon in part II.