We’re living through exciting times. The landscape of what computers can do is
changing by the week. Tasks that only a few years ago were thought to require
higher cognition are getting solved by machines at near-superhuman levels of per-
formance. Tasks such as describing a photographic image with a sentence in idiom-
atic English, playing complex strategy game, and diagnosing a tumor from a
radiological scan are all approachable now by a computer. Even more impressively,
computers acquire the ability to solve such tasks through examples, rather than
human-encoded of handcrafted rules.
