Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Definition - What does Artificial Intelligence (AI) mean?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of
intelligent machines that work and react like humans. Some of the activities computers with
artificial intelligence are designed for include:

Speech recognition

Learning

Planning

Problem solving

Techopedia explains Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that aims to create intelligent machines. It
has become an essential part of the technology industry.
Research associated with artificial intelligence is highly technical and specialized. The core
problems of artificial intelligence include programming computers for certain traits such as:

Knowledge

Reasoning

Problem solving

Perception

Learning

Planning

Ability to manipulate and move objects

Knowledge engineering is a core part of AI research. Machines can often act and react like
humans only if they have abundant information relating to the world. Artificial intelligence must
have access to objects, categories, properties and relations between all of them to implement
knowledge engineering. Initiating common sense, reasoning and problem-solving power in
machines is a difficult and tedious approach.
Machine learning is another core part of AI. Learning without any kind of supervision requires

an ability to identify patterns in streams of inputs, whereas learning with adequate supervision
involves classification and numerical regressions. Classification determines the category an
object belongs to and regression deals with obtaining a set of numerical input or output
examples, thereby discovering functions enabling the generation of suitable outputs from
respective inputs. Mathematical analysis of machine learning algorithms and their performance
is a well-defined branch of theoretical computer science often referred to as computational
learning theory.
Machine perception deals with the capability to use sensory inputs to deduce the different
aspects of the world, while computer vision is the power to analyze visual inputs with few subproblems such as facial, object and speech recognition.
Robotics is also a major field related to AI. Robots require intelligence to handle tasks such as
object manipulation and navigation, along with sub-problems of localization, motion planning
and mapping.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

By Jack Copeland
Copyright B.J. Copeland, May 2000
Sections

What is Intelligence?

Strong AI, Applied AI, and CS

Alan Turing and the Origins of AI

Early AI Programs

AI Programming Languages

Micro-World AI

Expert Systems

The CYC Project

Top-Down AI vs Bottom-Up AI

Connectionism

Nouvelle AI

Chess

Is Strong AI Possible?

The Chinese Room Objection

For More Information...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is usually defined as the science of making computers do

things that require intelligence when done by humans. AI has had some success in
limited, or simplified, domains. However, the five decades since the inception of AI have
brought only very slow progress, and early optimism concerning the attainment of
human-level intelligence has given way to an appreciation of the profound difficulty of
the problem.

What is Intelligence?
Quite simple human behaviour can be intelligent yet quite complex behaviour performed
by insects is unintelligent. What is the difference? Consider the behaviour of the digger
wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus. When the female wasp brings food to her burrow, she
deposits it on the threshold, goes inside the burrow to check for intruders, and then if
the coast is clear carries in the food. The unintelligent nature of the wasp's behaviour is
revealed if the watching experimenter moves the food a few inches while the wasp is
inside the burrow checking. On emerging, the wasp repeats the whole procedure: she
carries the food to the threshold once again, goes in to look around, and emerges. She
can be made to repeat this cycle of behaviour upwards of forty times in succession.
Intelligence--conspicuously absent in the case of Sphex--is the ability to adapt one's
behaviour to fit new circumstances.
Mainstream thinking in psychology regards human intelligence not as a single ability or
cognitive process but rather as an array of separate components. Research in AI has
focussed chiefly on the following components of intelligence: learning, reasoning,
problem-solving, perception, and language-understanding.
Learning

Learning is distinguished into a number of different forms. The simplest is learning by

trial-and-error. For example, a simple program for solving mate-in-one chess problems
might try out moves at random until one is found that achieves mate. The program
remembers the successful move and next time the computer is given the same problem
it is able to produce the answer immediately. The simple memorising of individual
items--solutions to problems, words of vocabulary, etc.--is known as rote learning.
Rote learning is relatively easy to implement on a computer. More challenging is the
problem of implementing what is called generalisation. Learning that involves
generalisation leaves the learner able to perform better in situations not previously
encountered. A program that learns past tenses of regular English verbs by rote will not
be able to produce the past tense of e.g. "jump" until presented at least once with

"jumped", whereas a program that is able to generalise from examples can learn the
"add-ed" rule, and so form the past tense of "jump" in the absence of any previous
encounter with this verb. Sophisticated modern techniques enable programs to
generalise complex rules from data.
Reasoning

To reason is to draw inferences appropriate to the situation in hand. Inferences are

classified as either deductive or inductive. An example of the former is "Fred is either in
the museum or the caf; he isn't in the caf; so he's in the museum", and of the latter
"Previous accidents just like this one have been caused by instrument failure; so
probably this one was caused by instrument failure". The difference between the two is
that in the deductive case, the truth of the premisses guarantees the truth of the
conclusion, whereas in the inductive case, the truth of the premiss lends support to the
conclusion that the accident was caused by instrument failure, but nevertheless further
investigation might reveal that, despite the truth of the premiss, the conclusion is in fact
false.
There has been considerable success in programming computers to draw inferences,
especially deductive inferences. However, a program cannot be said to reason simply in
virtue of being able to draw inferences. Reasoning involves drawing inferences that are
relevant to the task or situation in hand. One of the hardest problems confronting AI is
that of giving computers the ability to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant.
Problem-solving

Problems have the general form: given such-and-such data, find x. A huge variety of
types of problem is addressed in AI. Some examples are: finding winning moves in
board games; identifying people from their photographs; and planning series of
movements that enable a robot to carry out a given task.
Problem-solving methods divide into special-purpose and general-purpose. A specialpurpose method is tailor-made for a particular problem, and often exploits very specific
features of the situation in which the problem is embedded. A general-purpose method
is applicable to a wide range of different problems. One general-purpose technique
used in AI is means-end analysis, which involves the step-by-step reduction of the
difference between the current state and the goal state. The program selects actions
from a list of means--which in the case of, say, a simple robot, might consist of pickup,
putdown, moveforward, moveback, moveleft, and moveright--until the current state is
transformed into the goal state.
Perception

In perception the environment is scanned by means of various sense-organs, real or

artificial, and processes internal to the perceiver analyse the scene into objects and
their features and relationships. Analysis is complicated by the fact that one and the
same object may present many different appearances on different occasions,
depending on the angle from which it is viewed, whether or not parts of it are projecting
shadows, and so forth.

At present, artificial perception is sufficiently well advanced to enable a self-controlled

car-like device to drive at moderate speeds on the open road, and a mobile robot to
roam through a suite of busy offices searching for and clearing away empty soda cans.
One of the earliest systems to integrate perception and action was FREDDY, a
stationary robot with a moving TV 'eye' and a pincer 'hand' (constructed at Edinburgh
University during the period 1966-1973 under the direction of Donald Michie). FREDDY
was able to recognise a variety of objects and could be instructed to assemble simple
artefacts, such as a toy car, from a random heap of components.
Language-understanding

A language is a system of signs having meaning by convention. Traffic signs, for

example, form a mini-language, it being a matter of convention that, for example, the
hazard-ahead sign means hazard ahead. This meaning-by-convention that is distinctive
of language is very different from what is called natural meaning, exemplified in
statements like 'Those clouds mean rain' and 'The fall in pressure means the valve is
malfunctioning'.
An important characteristic of full-fledged human languages, such as English, which
distinguishes them from, e.g. bird calls and systems of traffic signs, is their productivity.
A productive language is one that is rich enough to enable an unlimited number of
different sentences to be formulated within it.
It is relatively easy to write computer programs that are able, in severely restricted
contexts, to respond in English, seemingly fluently, to questions and statements, for
example the Parry and Shrdlu programs described in the section Early AI Programs.
However, neither Parry nor Shrdlu actually understands language. An appropriately
programmed computer can use language without understanding it, in principle even to
the point where the computer's linguistic behaviour is indistinguishable from that of a
native human speaker of the language (see the section Is Strong AI Possible?). What,
then, is involved in genuine understanding, if a computer that uses language
indistinguishably from a native human speaker does not necessarily understand? There
is no universally agreed answer to this difficult question. According to one theory,
whether or not one understands depends not only upon one's behaviour but also upon
one's history: in order to be said to understand one must have learned the language
and have been trained to take one's place in the linguistic community by means of
interaction with other language-users.

Strong AI, Applied AI, and CS

Research in AI divides into three categories: "strong" AI, applied AI, and cognitive
simulation or CS.
Strong AI aims to build machines whose overall intellectual ability is indistinguishable
from that of a human being. Joseph Weizenbaum, of the MIT AI Laboratory, has
described the ultimate goal of strong AI as being "nothing less than to build a machine
on the model of man, a robot that is to have its childhood, to learn language as a child
does, to gain its knowledge of the world by sensing the world through its own organs,

and ultimately to contemplate the whole domain of human thought". The term "strong
AI", now in wide use, was introduced for this category of AI research in 1980 by the
philosopher John Searle, of the University of California at Berkeley. Some believe that
work in strong AI will eventually lead to computers whose intelligence greatly exceeds
that of human beings. Edward Fredkin, also of MIT AI Lab, has suggested that such
machines "might keep us as pets". Strong AI has caught the attention of the media, but
by no means all AI researchers view strong AI as worth pursuing. Excessive optimism in
the 1950s and 1960s concerning strong AI has given way to an appreciation of the
extreme difficulty of the problem, which is possibly the hardest that science has ever
undertaken. To date, progress has been meagre. Some critics doubt whether research
in the next few decades will produce even a system with the overall intellectual ability of
an ant.
Applied AI, also known as advanced information-processing, aims to produce
commercially viable "smart" systems--such as, for example, a security system that is
able to recognise the faces of people who are permitted to enter a particular building.
Applied AI has already enjoyed considerable success. Various applied systems are
described in this article.
In cognitive simulation, computers are used to test theories about how the human mind
works--for example, theories about how we recognise faces and other objects, or about
how we solve abstract problems (such as the "missionaries and cannibals" problem
described later). The theory that is to be tested is expressed in the form of a computer
program and the program's performance at the task--e.g. face recognition--is compared
to that of a human being. Computer simulations of networks of neurons have
contributed both to psychology and to neurophysiology (some of this work is described
in the section Connectionism). The program Parry, described below, was written in order
to test a particular theory concerning the nature of paranoia. Researchers in cognitive
psychology typically view CS as a powerful tool.

Artificial intelligence
The modern definition of artificial intelligence (or AI) is "the study and design of
intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment
and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success.