Hey, I’m Jabril, and this is CrashCourse
AI! Today, we’re going to try to teach John
Green-bot something. Hey John Green-bot! John Green-bot: “Hello humanoid friend!” Are you ready to learn? John Green-bot: “Hello humanoid friend!” As you can see, he has a lot of learning to
do, which is the basic story of all artificial intelligence. But it’s also our story. Humans aren’t born with many skills, and
we need to learn how to sort mail, land airplanes, and have friendly conversations. So computer scientists have tried to help
computers learn like we do, with a process called supervised learning. You ready, John Green-bot? John Green-bot: “Hello humanoid friend!” The process of learning is how anything can
make decisions, like for example humans, animals, or AI systems.
They can adapt their behavior based on their
experiences. In Crash Course AI, we’ll talk about three
main types of learning: Reinforcement Learning, Unsupervised Learning, and Supervised Learning. Reinforcement Learning is the process of learning
in an environment, through feedback from an AI’s behavior, it’s how kids learn to
walk! No one tells them how, they just practice,
stumble, and get better at balancing until they can put one foot in front of the other. Unsupervised Learning is the process of learning without training labels. It could also be called clustering or grouping. Sites like YouTube use unsupervised learning
to find patterns in the frames of a video, and compress those frames so that videos can
be streamed to us quickly. And Supervised Learning is the process of
learning with training labels. It’s the most widely used kind of learning
when it comes to AI, and it’s what we’ll focus on today and in the next few videos! Supervised learning is when someone who knows
the right answers, called a supervisor, points out mistakes during the learning process.
You can think of this like when a teacher
corrects a student’s math. In one kind of supervised setting, we want
an AI to consider some data, like an image of an animal, and classify it with a label,
like “reptile” or “mammal.” AI needs computing power and data to learn. And that’s especially true for supervised
learning, which needs a lot of training examples from a supervisor. After training this hypothetical AI, it should
be able to correctly classify images it hasn’t seen before, like a picture of a kitten as
a mammal. That’s how we know it’s learning instead
of just memorizing answers. And supervised learning is a key part of lots
of AI you interact with every day! It’s how email accounts can correctly classify
a message from your boss as important, and ads as spam.
It’s how Facebook tells your face apart
from your friend’s face so that it can make tag suggestions when you upload a photo. And it’s how your bank may decide whether
your loan request is approved or not. Now, to initially create this kind of AI,
computer scientists were loosely inspired by human brains. They were mostly interested in cells called
neurons, because our brains have billions of them. Each neuron has three basic parts: the cell
body, the dendrites, and the axon. The axon of one neuron is separated from the
dendrites of another neuron by a small gap called a synapse. And neurons talk to each other by passing
electric signals through synapses. As one neuron receives signals from other
neurons, the electric energy inside of its cell body builds up until a threshold is crossed. Then, an electric signal shoots down the axon,
and is passed to another neuron — where everything repeats. So the goal of early computer scientists wasn’t
to mimic a whole brain. Their goal was to create one artificial neuron
that worked like a real one. To see how, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
In 1958, a psychologist named
Frank Rosenblatt was inspired by the Dartmouth Conference and was determined to create an
artificial neuron. His goal was to teach this AI to classify
images as “triangles” or “not-triangles” with his supervision. That’s what makes it supervised learning! The machine he built was about the size of
a grand piano, and he called it the Perceptron. Rosenblatt wired the Perceptron to a 400 pixel
camera, which was hi-tech for the time, but is about a billion times less powerful than
the one on the back of your modern cellphone. He would show the camera a picture of a triangle
or a not-triangle, like a circle. Depending on if the camera saw ink or paper
in each spot, each pixel would send a different electric signal to the Perceptron. Then, the Perceptron would add up all the
signals that match the triangle shape. If the total charge was above its threshold,
it would send an electric signal to turn on a light. That was artificial neuron speak for “yes,
that’s a triangle!” But if the electric charge was too weak to
hit the threshold, it wouldn’t do anything and the light wouldn’t
turn on, that meant “not a triangle.” At first, the Perceptron was basically making
random guesses.
So to train it with supervision, Rosenblatt
used “yes” and “no” buttons. If the Perceptron was correct, he would push
the “yes” button and nothing would change. But if the Perceptron was wrong, he would
push the “no” button, which set off a chain of events that adjusted how much electricity
crossed the synapses, and adjusted the machine’s threshold levels. So it’d be more likely to get the answer
correct next time! Thanks, Thought Bubble. Nowadays, rather than building huge machines
with switches and lights, we can use modern computers to program AI to behave like neurons. The basic concepts are pretty much the same: First, the artificial neuron receives inputs
multiplied by different weights, which correspond to the strength of each signal. In our brains, the electric signals between
neurons are all the same size, but with computers, they can vary. The threshold is represented by a special
weight called a bias, which can be adjusted to raise or lower the neuron’s eagerness
to fire. So all the inputs are multiplied by their
respective weights, added together, and a mathematical function gets a result.
In the simplest AI systems, this function
is called a step function, which only outputs a 0 or a 1. If the sum is less than the bias, then the
neuron will output a 0, which could indicate not-triangle or something else depending on
the task. But If the sum is greater than the bias, then
the neuron will output a 1, which indicates the opposite result! An AI can be trained to make simple decisions
about anything where you have enough data and supervised labels: triangles, junk mail,
languages, movie genres, or even similar looking foods. Like donuts and bagels. Hey John Green-bot! You want to learn how to sort some disgusting
bagels from delicious donuts?” John Green-bot: “Hello humanoid friend!” John Green-bot still has the talk-like-a-human program! Remember that we don’t have generalized
AI yet… that program is pretty limited. So I need to swap this out for a perceptron
program.
Now that John Green-bot is ready to learn,
we’ll measure the mass and diameter of some bagels and donuts, and supervise him so he
gets better at labeling them. How about you hold on to these for me? Right now, he doesn’t know anything about
bagels or donuts or what their masses and diameters might be. So his program is initially using random weights
for mass, diameter, and the bias to help make a decision. But as he learns, those weights will be updated! Now, we can use different mathematical functions
to account for how close or far an AI is from the correct decision, but we’re going to
keep it simple.
John Green-bot’s perceptron program is using
a step function, so it’s an either-or choice. 0 or 1. Bagel or donut. Completely right or completely wrong. Let’s do it. This here is a mixed batch of bagels and donuts. This first item has a mass of 34 grams and a diameter of 7.8 centimeters. The perceptron takes these inputs (mass and
diameter), multiplies them by their respective weights, then adds them together.
If the sum is greater than the bias — which,
remember, is the threshold for the neuron firing — John Green-bot will say “bagel.” So if it helps to think of it this way, the
bias is like a bagel threshold. If the sum is less than the bias, it hasn’t
crossed the bagel threshold, and John Green-bot will say “donut.” All this math can be tricky to picture. So to visualize what’s going on, we can
think of John Green-bot’s perceptron program as a graph, with mass on one axis and diameter
on the other.
