Machine learning is the science of giving computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. The idea is that there exist generic algorithms which can be used to find patterns in a broad class of data sets without having to write code specifically for each problem. The algorithm will build its own logic based on the data.

Machine learning is a subfield of computer science, and is closely related to computational statistics. It evolved from the study of pattern recognition in artificial intelligence (AI) research, and has made contributions to AI tasks like computer vision, natural language processing and speech recognition. It has also, especially in later years, found applications in a wide variety of other areas, including bioinformatics, economy, physics, finance and marketing.

You will notice however that many of the basic ideas discussed do come from Physics!