Proposal: Machine Learning
Machine Learning is a large enough sub-field of Artificial Intelligence, I figure we might as well change the name (+ description) of this proposal to Artificial Intelligence.
This may also increase the amount of interest in this site.
Comments?
If you want to talk about ML, using the term "AI" instead is so vague that it is misleading.
Machine learning is basically a series of tasks (clustering, classification, reinforcement learning, etc) unified only by the fact that they are types of statistical inference.
In contrast, artificial intelligence encompasses much larger swath of problems -- robotics, natural language processing, computer vision, combinatorial search, and so on.
So while AI uses ML techniques heavily, it is wrong to say that it is given or even likely that AI entails ML. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.
We should pick exactly one thing we want to do well, and then go do it well.
There was an earlier Artificial Intelligence proposal that didn't make it beyond beta. So I guess that name doesn't give that much of a leg up
First, lets clean up the terminology so we can be objective and avoid confusion. Neither AI nor ML are vague terms, nor are they poorly defined fields. Just because a field is broad does not imply that it is vague or poorly defined (eg. mathematics). From Wikipedia:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology and a branch of computer science that studies and develops intelligent machines and software.
Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is about the construction and study of systems that can learn from data.
An artificially intelligent system need not employ ML in order to accomplish a task. The two are interrelated, but one term is not more correct than the other.
Since ML is a smaller category than AI, as a SE site, it will unquestionably be less popular and therefore less successful than AI. The best strategy is to try the AI proposal again. We should muster as much support for AI as possible, as it is more likely to succeed than ML alone.
"when a proposal is closed or a site is closed down, users are always welcome to try again". Note that I didn't create this proposal, I'm just thinking ML is probably about 80%+ of AI (I may be way off), so I'm proposing we extend it. Even if my % is way off, I still definitely don't see how you can say ML might have a purpose, but AI won't work. The way I see it, at worst, AI can have all the questions ML could've had, there's no loss of scope."No experts exist"seems like the least likely reason of those to me (with the exception of"Bad timing").