Swimming. It used to be that swimmers were supposed to be streamlined and avoid bulky muscles. Then a weightlifter decided he wanted to swim. Swimmers today all lift weights.
Programming. It used to be that people built programs in a very top down, heavily planned way. Think waterfall. We now understand that a highly iterative process is more appropriate in most areas of programming.
Expert systems. It used to be that we would develop expert systems (machine translation, competitive games, etc) through building large sets of explicit rules based on what human experts thought would work. Today we start with simple systems, large data sets, and use a variety of machine learning algorithms to let the program figure out its own rules. (One of the giant turning points there was when Google Translate completely demolished all existing translation software.)
Swimming. It used to be that swimmers were supposed to be streamlined and avoid bulky muscles. Then a weightlifter decided he wanted to swim. Swimmers today all lift weights.
Programming. It used to be that people built programs in a very top down, heavily planned way. Think waterfall. We now understand that a highly iterative process is more appropriate in most areas of programming.
Expert systems. It used to be that we would develop expert systems (machine translation, competitive games, etc) through building large sets of explicit rules based on what human experts thought would work. Today we start with simple systems, large data sets, and use a variety of machine learning algorithms to let the program figure out its own rules. (One of the giant turning points there was when Google Translate completely demolished all existing translation software.)