Question: How would you make the computers know how to stop the bridge fall down ?

Adam Wootton answered on 11 Nov 2019:

I use something called a neural network, which is a bit like a computer version of a human brain. They are nowhere near as good as your human brain, which knows how to do lots of different things, such as breathing, walking and doing maths (sometimes all at the same time). Neural networks normally only know how to do one thing, but are very good at that one thing. They’re really, really good at spotting patterns.
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When you’re in school, your teachers give you lots of example questions to help you learn. You actually learn how to do everything by just trying it out and practicing. Neural networks are exactly the same. If I want to make a network to stop a bridge falling down, I will need it to know what a bridge looks like when it’s starting to get damaged. To do this, I will show it lots and lots of examples of the bridge when it is normal and when it is damaged. This teaches it to tell the difference between a working bridge and a damaged bridge.
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The computer will then get lots of information from the bridge every day and if it sees that it starts to look damaged, then it can tell somebody who needs to know about it and they can make sure that it gets repaired.