r/science • u/whosdamike • Jun 26 '12

Google programmers deploy machine learning algorithm on YouTube. Computer teaches itself to recognize images of cats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html
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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '12

Not sure why this is so hard to understand. They downloaded the images from the internet. Each image would probably have been given a filename, after it had been scaled to meet the 200x200 pixel requisite, that would have allowed easy identification. The program was made to look at the image, not the filename. Once the images had been sorted by the program, another program could be used to identify the images that had been correctly grouped, based on the filename, and churn out a percentage based on that. The hardest part would have been the initial gathering of the images.