Machine Learning, revised and updated edition (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)

by Ethem Alpaydin

Things in the world change smoothly. This is Leibniz’s dictum that “Nature does not make jumps.” We are not “beamed” from point A to point B, but we need to pass through a sequence of intermediate locations. Objects occupy a continuous block of space in the world. Nearby points in our visual field belong to the same object and hence mostly have shades of the same color. Sound too, whether in song or speech, changes smoothly. Discontinuities correspond to boundaries, and they are rare.