A newborn baby doesn’t understand the words being spoken, can’t read the characters written on hospital walls, and can’t make sense of the tickle on their legs. But as they grow, they become part of the intelligent species, not because they were born into it (no one is), but because they learn to recognize patterns in everything.
Pattern Recognition¶
The ease with which we recognize a face, understand spoken words, read handwritten characters, identify our car keys in our pocket by feel, and decide whether an apple is ripe by its smell belies the astoundingly complex processes that underlie these acts of pattern recognition. Pattern recognition — the act of taking in raw data and making an action based on the “category” of the pattern—has been crucial for our survival, and over the past tens of millions of years we have evolved highly sophisticated neural and cognitive systems for such tasks. R. O. Duda & Stork (2001, ch. 1)
If we can build machines that recognize patterns, wouldn’t that be helpful? Is that what we call intelligence?
- R. O. Duda, P. E. Hart, & Stork, D. G. (2001). Pattern classification, Second edition. Wiley. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/northeastern-ebooks/detail.action?docID=699526