How it does this no one is quite sure – machine learning is often a black box . But it seems likely it is at least partly learning which characters are likely to occur in sequence, thus determining that you are unlikely to want to be shopping for “qvjx”, however much the word might look like that. Over the last ten years, researchers have gradually been working out how to teach computers to read handwritten documents . As in most machine learning, a computer is fed training data: in this case, images of handwriting and details of what it says....