By John Markoff
Dec. 10, 2015

Excerpt: "Computer researchers reported artificial-intelligence advances on Thursday that surpassed human capabilities for a narrow set of vision-related tasks.

The improvements are noteworthy because so-called machine-vision systems are becoming commonplace in many aspects of life, including car-safety systems that detect pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as in video game controls, Internet search and factory robots.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and the University of Toronto reported a new type of “one shot” machine learning on Thursday in the journal Science, in which a computer vision program outperformed a group of humans in identifying handwritten characters based on a single example.

The program is capable of quickly learning the characters in a range of languages and generalizing from what it has learned. The authors suggest this capability is similar to the way humans learn and understand concepts."

A version of the this article appears in print on December 11, 2015, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: An Advance in Artificial Intelligence Rivals Human Vision Abilities.