Simple Electrical Circuit Learns On Its Own -- With No Help From a Computer

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: A simple electrical circuit has learned to recognize flowers based on their petal size. That may seem trivial compared with artificial intelligence (AI) systems that recognize faces in a crowd, transcribe spoken words into text, and perform other astounding feats. However, the tiny circuit outshines conventional machine learning systems in one key way: It teaches itself without any help from a computer -- akin to a living brain. The result demonstrates one way to avoid the massive amount of computation typically required to tune an AI system, an issue that could become more of a roadblock as such programs grow increasingly complex. [...] The network was tuned to perform a variety of simple AI tasks. For example, it could distinguish with greater than 95% accuracy between three species of iris depending on four physical measurements of a flower: the lengths and widths of its petals and sepals -- the leaves just below the blossom. That's a canonical AI test that uses a standard set of 150 images, 30 of which were used to train the network.

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