feeding them data and letting them learn a few tricks on their own without being explicitly programmed now this sounds awfully a lot like a human child so let's consider a small scenario to understand machine learning now as a child if you had to distinguish between fruits such as cherries apples and oranges you wouldn't even know where to start because you're not familiar with how the fruits look now as we grow up we collect more information and start developing the capability to distinguish between various fruits the only reason