“This is part of what makes AIs attractive problem solvers, and is particularly handy if the rules are really complicated or just plain mysterious. For example, AI is often used for image recognition, a surprisingly complicated task that’s difficult to do with an ordinary computer program. **Although most of us are easily able to identify a cat in a picture, it’s really hard to come up with the rules that define a cat.** Do we tell the program that a cat has two eyes, a nose, two ears, and a tail? That also describes a mouse and a giraffe. And what if the cat is curled up or facing away? Even writing down the rules for detecting a single eye is tricky. **But an AI can look at tens of thousands of images of cats and come up with rules that correctly identify a cat most of the time**.” --- **Tags** — [[quotes]], [[artificial-intelligence]], [[ai-problems]], [[teaching-anecdotes]] **Source** — [[202307171347 — B — You Look Like a Thing and I Love You]]