While in fields that do use precise characterization—chess, algebraic manipulation, and business process automation—AI made great advances, in other fields, like language translation and visual object recognition, inherent ambiguity brought progress to a halt. The challenges of visual object recognition illustrate the shortcomings of these early programs. Even young children can identify images with ease. But early generations of AI could not. Programmers initially attempted to distill an object’s distinguishing characteristics into a symbolic representation.