brief history of machine learning machine learning is subfield of artificial intelligence (aiin which computers learn from data--usually to improve their performance on some narrowly defined task-without being explicitly programmed the term machine learning was coined as early as (by arthur samuela legend in the field of ai)but there were few major commercial successes in machine learning during the twenty-first century insteadthe field remained niche research area for academics at universities early on (in the smany in the ai community were too optimistic about its future researchers at the timesuch as herbert simon and marvin minskyclaimed that ai would reach human-level intelligence within matter of decades: machines will be capablewithin twenty yearsof doing any work man can do --herbert simon from three to eight yearswe will have machine with the general intelligence of an average human being --marvin minsky blinded by their optimismresearchers focused on so-called strong ai or general artificial intelligence (agiprojectsattempting to build ai agents capable of problem solvingknowledge representationlearning and planningnatural language processingperceptionand motor control this optimism helped attract significant funding into the nascent field from major players such as the department of defensebut the problems these researchers tackled were too ambitious and ultimately doomed to fail ai research rarely made the leap from academia to industryand series of so-called ai winters followed in these ai winters (an analogy based on the nuclear winter dur such views inspired stanley kubrick in to create the ai agent hal in space odyssey xi