How to learn machine learning concepts using Enthiran movie

Note: People who watched Enthiran movie may correlate the following article easily

When Learning is Fun?

Learning is fun when you actually don’t know that you are learning it. Lots of concepts and subjects have been taught to us by our schools and college staff members. Only few topics and concepts alone, we can remember a lifetime. While finding answer for it, memory is not a big deal because god has given enormous storage process to our brain. That’s why still we can recollect a childhood event in a picture or video format. So, when does the brain store a particular event for a long time in our memory? The answer is simple: whatever we understand and send inside to the brain will be stored long term and whatever we are sending by just memorizing will store for short term. In computer terms RAM for memorizing data and ROM for understanding data.

Impact of movie in learning

How it would be if any of the tedious concepts in our subjects are taught to us in a simple way? Everyone will be happy to learn those stuffs. Ideally books are the primary source of learning but still there are some other easy pathway to learn. One of the ways which provide easy learning is movie. We can’t keep movie away from our life because it provides lots of entertainment. Apart from that movie also teach us about the purpose of life, politics, business, philosophy, science and many inventions.

Enthiran – What is it?

I am going to take a leaf out of a movie named “Enthiran” which was released in 2010 by Sun Pictures. The movie was directed by Mr. Shankar and our own Superstar Mr. Rajnikanth played both Protagonist and Antagonist role. This is a science fiction movie so we have a lot of technical content in it. The Theme of the movie is a scientist named Mr. Vaseegaran who successfully developed an andro-humanoid robot called ‘chitti’ to serve people. The whole movie is about how chitti sees the new world, what he could learn from human beings, in what way it could be useful for society, how things went wrong with incorporation of human feelings and finally what happened to the most powerful robot.

Machine Learning – What is it?

As mentioned earlier lot of scientific and technical details were provided in the movie. We will explore things related to machine learning and how it was beautifully explained in the movie. Machine Learning is a field of computer science and engineering, which was highly correlated with artificial intelligence. In computer terms “ability to learn on its own and improvise further through its experience without explicitly programmed “. In simple words “Machine Learning” name itself gives the meaning: how a machine learns

Let us take examples of some of machine learning concepts

1. Supervised Learning
2. Unsupervised Learning
3. Reinforcement Learning
4. Back Propagation

We will overview all the above-mentioned concepts technically and will correlate with the movie so that understanding gets better

1. Supervised Learning

When learning happens with a human intervention, then it is supervised learning.  Literally what it means is a developer has to code all the functionalities which a machine has to possess once it is arrived for duty.

Supervised learning in Movie

In the above-mentioned scene, Chitti was introduced to the outside world in an international robotic conference.  So many questions were thrown to the robot such as

1. 24157817 is a Fibonacci number or not – Chitti answers that it is 22^nd number in the Fibonacci series, also he replies that it is phone number of Mandavalli P Subramaniyam
2. What is the biggest prime number you know – Chitti types so many numbers and says M44
3. One person started singing and stops asked Chitti to continue- Chitti corrected mistakes in it and complete it.

All the answers given by Chitti was pre-programmed by Dr. Vaseegaran.

Chitti just needs to revisit his memory chip and fetch the data.

2. Unsupervised Learning

When learning happens without having a proper guidance from the developer then it is Unsupervised learning.  Machine start learning by itself by observing what is happening around. Purely based on experience.

Unsupervised learning in Movie

In the above-mentioned scene, in a local train character Sana was explaining to chitti that reason for saying I don’t know who is chitti in front of professors is: if she admits involving chitti for malpractice she would have been disqualified from college. So, she made chitti as scapegoat in that incident. Chitti calmly replies “I understood that human being will lie when they need to protect themselves”. No one taught about this statement to Chitti.  But he understood with his own experience.

3. Reinforcement Learning

When learning happens after a sequence of incidents then it is Reinforcement learning. Like a chess game. We can also say it is a mix of supervised and unsupervised learning. Machine start applying some process based on the previous results explored

Reinforcement learning in Movie

In the above-mentioned scene, the evil chitti sees a blood drop in Sana’s room and he also noticed some anonymous changes in sana suddenly.  Immediately, Chitti found that the blood group is different from Sana’s blood group and in that place, there is no room for another human being.  Here comes the reinforcement learning, chitti started to decode things with famous dialogue “ To this room another robot served the food, 10 minutes camera was not functioning, sudden changes in your mindset, power cut, water in generator” and found Dr. Vaseegaran should be here  and also he recollect the statement  human being will lie when they need to protect themselves (which he learnt in train scene). Chitti is able to make decisions after considering several sequential incidents and applying the context of unsupervised learning.

4. Back Propagation

Back propagation is a concept of adjusting its hidden layers of neural network when the desired outcome is not found. In simple ways, if a particular way of proceeding is  not yielding the expected result, revisit the path traveled and make some alteration in the  proceeding which will yield the desired results

Back Propagation in Movie

In the above-mentioned scene, both Sana And Chitti planned to do malpractice for semester exam. When chitti get caught by professors he conveys the truth. While professors interrogating sana, she says I don’t know whom this person is even though when chitti is still sticking to the truth. By entrusting Sana’s words, professors took chitti out of the exam hall, while leaving chitti says “Task Incomplete”. Sana felt bad that she hurt chitti and don’t know how to proceed exam as she doesn’t know anything. Here machine learning concept “Back Propagation” comes into picture, chitti knows the task is incomplete and he will help sana by displaying the answers through the inbuilt display in his eye. Chitti found an alternate way to help sana

When we start applying/ correlating the concepts we learned with the outside world, it will become easier to understand those concepts.