Thus, instead of an equation describing, for example, the back-and-forth swaying of a pendulum, the computer discovered principles like the conservation of energy and momentum.
Mr. Draper was still a student at a local community college, but the owner of Call Computer discovered that Mr. Draper had a flair for programming and offered him a job.
For example, Dr. Smailagic said, once a hand-held computer discovered that its owner had carried it into the boss's office, it could send out a signal shutting down its owner's cellphone.
The senior Pakistani official said the information that Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Mohammed met in February came from documents, CD-ROM's and a computer discovered at the time of Mr. Mohammed's arrest.
"It's as if you go to an oracle and you ask, 'Tell me what's going on here,' and you get this equation, but then it doesn't come with any explanation," Dr. Lipson said of the new laws the computer discovered.
In truth, the signal figure of the Moneyball era may not have been Beane, the charismatic guerrilla bro, but his assistant Paul DePodesta, whose computer discovered the hidden talents of players who failed the eye test (the obese catcher, the pitcher who threw not from his shoulder but from his knee).
After exploring the game by playing it, the computer discovered advanced strategies that few humans know about, such as digging a hole to bounce the ball along the back side of the wall.
Vlad Mnih, one of the Google team behind the work, said: "It's definitely fun to see computers discover things you haven't figured out yourself".
Machine learning aims to help computers discover such fuzzy rules by themselves, without having to be explicitly instructed every step of the way by human programmers.There are many different kinds of machine learning.
The data come largely from a trove of documents and computers discovered in September, when American forces raided a tent camp in the desert near Sinjar, close to the Syrian border.
