I like Tom Mitchell's definition in his machine learning book: 'A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and

I like Tom Mitchell's definition in his machine learning book: 'A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.' Merriam Webster's definition of statistics: 'a branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of masses of numerical data' So establish a couple of definitions, and take it from there. I believe such discussions can easily be taken too far: surely the point of a subject is to group together related topics. Who is to say that the set of topics comprising multiple subjects need to be disjoint?