Teach your computer

9th October 2017

AI or machine intelligence is defined as the apparently intelligent behaviour of machines. As an example of how clever and also simple and stupid this can be Google has created a website which, in their own words:

This experiment lets anyone explore how machine learning works, in a fun, hands-on way. You can teach a machine to using your camera, live in the browser – no coding required. You train a neural network locally on your device, without sending any images to a server. That’s how it responds so quickly to you. Watch this video to learn more:

To try this out for yourself all you need to do is visit the webpage linked above on a computer equipped with a camera. You can then train your computer to ‘recognise’ the video and respond with a picture or sound as you desire.

The reason we say recognise with quotes is that, of course, your computer isn’t really recongising thew object in the same way that we do. It’s only performing a, relatively simple, image match. It’s still very cleaver and an interesting example of technology. Could be useful in a classroom to explain some elements of computer science.