How it learned

Those self-turning dials are the mechanism. They are how the machine learned.

Picture it on day one. Every dial is set to some random spot, so the machine has no idea what a letter looks like. You show it the letter A. It makes a wild guess: "not an A." Wrong.

So the motors do something simple. They nudge each dial a tiny bit, in whatever direction would have made the guess a little closer to right. The dials that pointed it the wrong way get turned down. The ones that pointed it the right way get turned up.

One nudge barely changes anything. But then you show it the next card. And the next. Thousands of times. With every mistake, the dials creep a little closer to settings that work.

Nobody ever told it what an A looks like. It found the answer itself, by being wrong and adjusting, again and again, until the mistakes ran out. That is what Rosenblatt meant by learning.

How it learned

Those self-turning dials are the mechanism. They are how the machine learned.

Picture it on day one. Every dial is set to some random spot, so the machine has no idea what a letter looks like. You show it the letter A. It makes a wild guess: "not an A." Wrong.

One nudge barely changes anything. But then you show it the next card. And the next. Thousands of times. With every mistake, the dials creep a little closer to settings that work.

Nobody ever told it what an A looks like. It found the answer itself, by being wrong and adjusting, again and again, until the mistakes ran out. That is what Rosenblatt meant by learning.