Smartest Machine on Earth

Smartest Machine on Earth

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What is "machine learning"?

How a machine learns behaviors based on emperical data.
How did the IBM team employ that concept in the development of Watson's AI?  The IBM team put thousands of old Jeopardy questions and their answers so that Watson could look for patterns in the questions and in teh asnwers so Watson could determine the context of the question. What advantage did that provide over previous attempts at "intelligence"?  The advantage that this provided was that now the computer could so call "think" of all the possible answers and determine the corecct one.
I've often mentioned the term "Empirical Scepticism". What does that mean?   

It is the practice of questioning the veracity of claims lacking empirical evidence or reproducibility

How does that relate to the concept of Machine Learning?  This relates because the computer has to be able to act upon the question with the knowledge of a human. How does this relate to your life? This relates to my life, because you have to be able to procces the context of a question, and the computer can not determine the context of the question.