Here's a classifier that uses explicitly programmed instructions: def classify(word): return word[0] What you would do instead with supervised lea

Here's a classifier that uses explicitly programmed instructions: def classify(word): return word[0] What you would do instead with supervised learning or other ML methods, is to give the algorithm some inputs and outputs, e.g. "Hello => H", "World => W" and then let the algorithm come up with a model that will know that the answer to "Sunshine" is "S" without you having explicitly coded that. Of course, in reality you wouldn't use machine learning to alphabetize words. It's most useful when explicit or exact classification / modeling / prediction is simply not possible, as e.g. with spam detection.