Chapter 12 An Introduction to Machine Learning Algorithms

How do we communicate the patterns of desired behavior for baking bread? We can teach:

• by instruction: “to make bread, you need flour, yeast, salt, and water. Mix them together and knead the dough for 10 minutes.”
• by example: “here are six loaves of perfect bread; here, six loaves of burnt bread. see a pattern?”
• by reinforcement: “bake bread every day for a month; learn from the texture, color, and taste of each loaf.”

Machine learning is the art of programming computers to learn from such sources, and in this case, it would involve teaching a machine learning algorithm to recognize the patterns of successful bread baking based on examples.