Question: How can you program a computer to understand something that even humans have difficulty with?

Gary Munnelly answered on 7 Nov 2018:

There is a thing called the law of large numbers which basically says that if you make enough observations about something over a long enough period of time then eventually you will be able to spot a pattern. Taking advantage of this law is one of the ways that we can program a computer to understand things that are too complex for a human.

A lot of modern approaches to getting computers to understand things that are too complex for humans to follow involves giving the computer millions and millions and millions of samples to look at. We then apply some mathematical models to all of those samples. If you have enough samples and the mathematical models are good enough, then the computer can start to figure out patterns that were too complex for the human brain to work out. In artificial intelligence, this is called unsupervised learning.

The thing is, this can involve a lot of computations, which is why people like Dimitar need to use computing clusters with multiple GPUs to crunch through all the maths that needs to be done.