机器学习学习笔记——1.1.1.2.1 What is machine learning?（什么是机器学习？）

What is machine learning? In this video, you'll learn the definition of what it is and also get a sense of when you might want to apply it. Let's take a look together. Here's a definition of what is machine learning that is attributed to Arthur Samuel. He defined machine learning as the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

Samuel's claim to fame was that back in the 1950s, he wrote a checkers playing program. The amazing thing about this program was that Arthur Samuel himself wasn't a very good checkers player. What he did was he had programmed the computer to play maybe tens of thousands of games against itself. By watching what sort of board positions tend to lead to wins and what positions tend to lead to losses the checkers playing program learned over time what are good or bad board positions by trying to get a good and avoid bad positions, this program learned to get better and better at playing checkers because the computer had the patience to play tens of thousands of games against itself. It was able to get so much checkers playing experience that eventually it became a better checkers player than also, Samuel himself.

Now throughout these videos, besides me trying to talk about stuff, I occasionally ask you a question to help make sure you understand the content. Here's one about what happens if the computer had played far fewer games. Please take a look and pick whichever you think is the better answer. Thanks for looking at the quiz. If you had selected this answer would have made it worse then you got the right. In general, the more opportunities you give a learning algorithm to learn, the better it will perform. If you didn't select the correct answer the first time, that's totally okay too. The point of these questions isn't to see if you can get them all correctly on the first try. These questions are here just to help you practice the concepts you are learning.

Arthur Samuel's definition was a rather informal one but in the next two videos, we'll dive deeper together into what are the major types of machine learning algorithms? In this course, you learn about many different learning algorithms. The two main types of machine learning are supervised learning and unsupervised learning. We'll define what these terms mean more in the next couple of videos. Of these two, supervised learning is the type of machine learning that is used most in many real-world applications and has seen the most rapid advancements and innovation.

In this specialization, which has three courses in total, the first and second courses will focus on supervised learning, and the third will focus on unsupervised learning, recommender systems, and reinforcement learning. By far, the most used types of learning algorithms today are supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and recommender systems.

The other thing we're going to spend a lot of time on in this specialization is practical advice for applying learning algorithms. This is something I feel pretty strongly about. Teaching about learning algorithms is like giving someone a set of tools and equally important, so even more important to making sure you have great tools is making sure you know how to apply them because like is it is somewhere where it gives you a state-of-the-art hammer or a state-of-the-art hand drill and say good luck. Now you have all the tools you need to build a three-story house. It doesn't really work like that and so too, in machine learning, making sure you have the tools is really important and so is making sure that you know how to apply the tools of machine learning effectively. That's what you get in this class, the tools as well as the skills to apply them effectively.

I regularly visit with friends and teams in some of the top tech companies, and even today I see experienced machine learning teams apply machine learning algorithms to some problems, and sometimes they've been going at it for six months without much success. When I look at what they're doing, I sometimes feel like I could have told them six months ago that the current approach won't work and there's a different way of using these tools that will give them a much better chance of success. In this class, one of the relatively unique things you learn is you learn a lot about the best practices for how to actually develop a practical, valuable machine learning system. This way, you're less likely to end up in one of those teams that end up losing six months going in the wrong direction. In this class, you gain a sense of how the most skilled machine learning engineers build systems. I hope you finish this class as one of those very rare people in today's world that know how to design and build serious machine learning systems. That's machine learning. In the next video, let's look more deeply at what is supervised learning and also what is unsupervised learning. In addition, you'll learn when you might want to use each of them, supervised and unsupervised learning. I'll see you in the next video.

机器学习是什么？在这个视频中，你会了解它的定义，并且会知道何时可能想要应用它。让我们一起看看。

这里有一个被归功于亚瑟·塞缪尔的机器学习的定义。他将机器学习定义为一个研究领域，赋予计算机在没有被明确编程的情况下学习的能力。

塞缪尔的成名之作是他在1950年代编写了一个下棋程序。这个程序的惊人之处在于亚瑟·塞缪尔本人并不是一个非常好的棋手。他所做的是让计算机与自己对弈了数万局。通过观察哪些棋盘位置倾向于导致胜利，哪些位置倾向于导致失败，这个下棋程序学会了随时间推移，通过尝试获得好的位置并避免坏的位置，这个程序学会了越来越好地下棋，因为计算机有耐心与自己对弈数万局。它能够获得如此多的下棋经验，以至于最终它变得比亚瑟·塞缪尔本人还要擅长下棋。

现在，在这些视频中，除了我试图谈论的内容外，我偶尔会问你一个问题，以帮助确保你理解内容。这里有一个关于如果计算机玩了更少的游戏会发生什么的问题。请看一下并选择你认为更好的答案。感谢你查看了测验。如果你选择了这个答案，那会更糟，那么你答对了。一般来说，你给学习算法学习的机会越多，它的表现就会越好。如果你没有第一次就选择正确答案，那也完全没关系。这些问题的目的不是看你是否能第一次就全部答对。这些问题在这里只是帮助你练习你正在学习的概念。

亚瑟·塞缪尔的定义是一个相当非正式的，但在接下来两个视频中，我们将一起深入探讨什么是主要的机器学习算法类型？在这门课程中，你会学到许多不同的学习算法。两种主要的机器学习类型是有监督学习和无监督学习。我们将在接下来的几个视频中更详细地定义这些术语的含义。在这两种类型中，有监督学习是在许多现实世界应用中使用最多的机器学习类型，也是进步最快和创新最多的类型。

在这个专业中，总共有三门课程，前两门课程将专注于有监督学习，第三门将专注于无监督学习、推荐系统和强化学习。到目前为止，使用最广泛的学习算法类型是有监督学习、无监督学习和推荐系统。

在这门专业中，我们还将花费大量时间在实际建议上，用于应用学习算法。这是我非常强烈感受到的一点。教授学习算法就像给某人一套工具一样重要，甚至更重要的，是确保你知道如何应用它们，因为就像给你一把最先进的锤子或手钻，然后说祝你好运。现在你有建造三层楼所需的所有工具了。这并不真正奏效，因此，在机器学习中也是如此，确保你拥有工具非常重要，确保你知道如何有效应用机器学习的工具同样重要。这就是你在这门课中得到的，工具以及有效应用它们的技能。

我经常拜访一些顶级科技公司的朋友和团队，即使到今天，我看到有经验的机器学习团队将机器学习算法应用于一些问题，有时他们已经进行了六个月而没有取得多大成功。当我看到他们正在做什么时，我有时会觉得我本可以在六个月前告诉他们当前的方法行不通，有一种不同的使用这些工具的方式会给他们带来更大的成功机会。在这门课中，你学到的一个相对独特的东西是你学到了很多关于如何实际开发一个实用、有价值的机器学习系统的最佳实践。这样，你就不太可能成为一个团队，这个团队可能会失去六个月朝着错误的方向前进。在这门课中，你将获得最有技巧的机器学习工程师构建系统的感知。我希望你完成这门课后成为当今世界上最罕见的人之一，知道如何设计和构建严肃的机器学习系统。那就是机器学习。在下一个视频中，让我们更深入地看看什么是有监督学习和什么是无监督学习。此外，你还将了解何时可能想要使用它们中的每一种，有监督和无监督学习。我在下一个视频中等你。