Hi I'm Whichpet, a weak AI program that can work out from a description of your pet the kind of animal you are talking about.
At the moment I can understand when you're talking about cats, dogs, fish, birds, horses and reptiles. Feel free to describe your
pet below and I'll see if I can guess which type of pet it is. If I get it wrong you can tell me what type of pet it was and I can
learn from it!
Whichpet is a Naive Bayes Classifier written in Javascript. What that means is that it works out the probabilities that you are describing a pet of each
type by calculating the probability that you would use certain words. How does it know the probabilities? Well, you provide them.
Every time someone describes a pet and tells it which type of pet it was, data is added to a large list which it uses to work out the
chances.
I created Whichpet because I wanted to create an example of a very simple AI or Machine Learning program. It's easy for machine learning to feel
a little like magic, but once you peer beneath the hood machine intelligence is usually just a combination of fairly simple tricks.
In a later article I am going to talk about how machine learning and AI needn't feel like magic, and can be simple for everyone to understand.
If you would like to see or use the code for Whichpet, you can view the code on GitHub.
