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lavaboosted OP t1_j431okr wrote

Reply to comment by CurrentMaleficent714 in [D] Would you consider the computer program Theo Jansen used to design the Strandbeest (beach walking mechanisms) to be Machine Learning? by lavaboosted

Interesting, thanks. It seems a lot of people do lump it in with machine learning such as this video using a neural network and evolutionary algorithm to teach a car to drive around a track. Does the use of a feed forward neural network make it qualify as machine learning or still no? Or is it just a gray area?

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he_who_floats_amogus t1_j44kquo wrote

You can use all kinds of algorithms in machine learning. This is a “uses a” relationship rather than an equivalence relationship, in this case. If I’m building a piece of furniture, I am a carpenter. I could employ the use of a hammer to help me build the furniture. The hammer is not a carpenter.

I think you can imagine that the machine learning approach in that video may also rely on various data structures including graphs, trees, etc, and perhaps many other things which are also not machine learning.

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CurrentMaleficent714 t1_j47pgku wrote

Machine learning is about learning from data. How you do that is wide open, but usually there is an optimisation algorithm involved somewhere or another. The optimisation algorithm itself does not learn from data, it is a tool that is applied in some scheme to learn from data.

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