[macleodnine]

To me the recognizing of the letter is a whole lot more impressive than knowing facts about it (If we're talking about OCR).

In your example a computer could very easily learn those simple facts, just like you did. It's nothing to tell a program how to classify a piece of data. You didn't use some crazy learning when you attributed A to being part of a Latin alphabet, someone just told you that fact and you saved it and classified A into the Latin alphabet.