Machine Learning - more 5 year old milestones

Sundar spoke about the expected impact of machine learning at I/O. I'd like to put forth my observations of my 5yo daughter, who has just learnt to read, continuing from my earlier post on the topic. My sensitivity of this topic has been heightened as I work on autonomous driving in my day job.

So here we are reading Dick and Jane, which is still an excellent book for beginner readers.


As one progresses through the book you get introduced to the family. Here are their pets, on the page to the right

The cat's name is Puff, the teddy bear is Tim and the dog's name is Spot.

At one point in the book my daughter sees these pictures:

Without reading the text, my daughter said that it looks like they're making Spot and Puff out of PlayDoh. She thought Sally (the girl in the middle) was going to make a Tic Tac Toe game. She was thrilled when she read the text and found that they were indeed making their pets!

The memory from her own past experience of making things with PlayDoh was applied effortlessly by her. She chose to label the pets with names, not leaving them as generic "dogs" and "cats".

After seeing the final Tim, she shook her head and said that it didn't quite look like him.


I think it's still pretty hard for CV algorithms to get to this point without significant human help.
To add to it, she saw the text in the following image and said that it looks like an upside down staircase. This sort of lateral thinking is probably further away than teaching AlphaGo to play chess too.



That's all for today.
Kuntal.