Terence Tao on Nostr: The ability to make complex distinctions with high accuracy after ingesting a ...

The ability to make complex distinctions with high accuracy after ingesting a sufficient amount of training data is a signature feature of machine learning algorithms. But humans also have this ability, even if they are not always consciously aware of it. One of my favorite illustrations of this is the learned ability to determine (qualitatively) the temperature of water from its sound, which almost all of us have acquired purely through training data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri_4dDvcZeM

We even have the learned ability to accurately predict the next word in a sentence, even when we do not understand the semantic content of the sentence itself. Some (rather frustrated) examples of this occur in the later stages of the classic "Who's on first?" sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9t097tbeT0