In the old days, computer scientists tried to create artificially intelligent computers by programming them. This worked to a limited extent in areas like playing chess, but since the world can be unpredictable, computer scientists needed to create programs that could learn and adapt from their environment.

At Google’s research labs, they created an artificially intelligent program that could learn to recognize patterns on videos found on the Internet. The computer scientists taught the program how to teach itself, and it wound up learning to recognize the most prominent items found on Internet videos — cats.

“We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat,’” Jeff Dean, the Google fellow who led the study, told the New York Times. “It basically invented the concept of a cat.”

“Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not,” the team says in its paper, Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning, which it will present at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Edinburgh, 26 June-1 July.

By doing their part to advance the state of technology in the field of artificial intelligence, cats deserve a reward so be sure to feed them extra as a treat for making the world a better place.

Read mores about Google’s artificial intelligent algorithm that learned about cats here.

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