I'm watching a youtube video where a guy is talking about how computers can learn to go from some point A to some point B.
However, the way he does it is very disappointing: all he does is generate thousands of objects that go from A to some random destination, and then he updates all the random destinations by taking the average of the original destination + the destination of the object that got closest to B. This process is then repeated until convergence.
I don't see what's so impressive about this. If you wanted the machine to go from A to B, why did you not just ... you know .... tell it to go to B?. What's the point of essentially generating random instructions, and hoping one of those random instructions just happens to be: go to B, when you could just as well tell that instruction to the computer yourself?
Is this really what people mean when they say that a computer "learns" to do some task? And if so, what's so impressive about it? What am I missing?