Comments on Research / where to look next?

I am more or less paranoid that someone will read this and think I'm taking myself seriously in such a way that I firmly believe everything I type here. So I need to mention somewhere that I know I'm not a big shot (yet... maybe????I'll sure try), and I am simply brainstorming. 

Without further to do... the real reason I write this.

Alright so far machine learning is a couple different types of learning. supervised, unsupervised, ones where they give the right answer and one one that wont. To me this leaves a lot less than I want. Don't get me wrong I love it and i'm currently making a second tic tac toe program,my first one was perfect but looked at all possible outcomes, that will learn everything by playing against itself over and over again. 

Anyway, the problem with all of this is that the program only knows how to play within a very very very small context. So my tic-tac-toe over millions of games will learn to be perfect at it. Guess what, it's still just doing statistics sort of thing to figure it out. if I say "hi" it will do nothing at all. My question is, is all we are as humans really just a bunch of statisti crunchers, and if we are, by god we must have a lot of algorithms. 

Well ok the programs do learn better with 'experience'. My program will take millions of games probably to be perfect at the game. I only need maybe 100. Heck if I were really thinking about it I could have mastered tic-tac-toe the first time I played it, if I weren't 4. There's something missing, I feel like it's close but not there, not quite. 

I believe maybe if we both observe our own behaviors, maybe we can teach our computers to observe them and try to mimic. not only mimic but make smart variations within a context. Easier said than done, as usual.