A Learning Advance in Artificial Intelligence Rivals Human Abilities - The New York Times

Tangentially, see Chomsky Was Right, NYU Researchers Find: We Do Have a “Grammar” in Our Head (NYU News)

"The researchers compared the capabilities of their Bayesian approach and other programming models using five separate learning tasks that involved a set of characters from a research data set known as Omniglot, which includes 1,623 handwritten character sets from 50 languages. Both images and pen strokes needed to create characters were captured.

“With all the progress in machine learning, it’s amazing what you can do with lots of data and faster computers,” said Joshua B. Tenenbaum, a professor of cognitive science and computation at M.I.T. and one of the authors of the Science paper. “But when you look at children, it’s amazing what they can learn from very little data. Some comes from prior knowledge and some is built into our brain.”"

A Learning Advance in Artificial Intelligence Rivals Human Abilities - The New York Times