Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (also known as machine intelligence and often abbreviated as AI) is intelligence exhibited by any manufactured (i.e. ) system. The term is often applied to general purpose computers and also in the field of scientific investigation into the theory and practical application of AI. "AI" the term is often used in works of science fiction to refer to that which exhibits artificial intelligence as well, as in "the AI" referring to a singular discrete or distributed mechanism.

Modern AI

Modern AI research focuses on practical engineering tasks. (Supporters of Strong AI may call this approach 'weak AI'.)

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There are several fields of AI, one of which is natural language. Many weak AI fields have specialised software or programming languages created for them. For example, one of the 'most-human' natural language chatterbots, A.L.I.C.E., uses a programming language AIML that is specific to its program, and the various clones, named Alicebots. Nevertheless, A.L.I.C.E. is still based on pattern matching without any reasoning. This is the same technique Eliza, the first chatterbot, was using back in 1966. Jabberwacky is a little closer to strong AI, since it learns how to converse from the ground up based solely on user interactions. In spite of that, the result is still very poor, and it is reasonable to state that there is actually no general purpose conversational artificial intelligence.

Related Topics:
Natural language - Chatterbot - A.L.I.C.E. - AIML - Alicebot - Eliza - 1966 - Jabberwacky

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When viewed with a moderate dose of cynicism, AI can be viewed as ‘the set of computer science problems without good solutions at this point’. Once a sub-discipline results in useful work, it is carved out of artificial intelligence and given its own name. Examples of this are pattern recognition, image processing, neural networks, natural language processing, robotics and game theory. While the roots of each of these disciplines is firmly established as having been part of artificial intelligence, they are now thought of as somewhat separate.

Related Topics:
Pattern recognition - Image processing - Neural networks - Natural language processing - Robotics - Game theory

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Whilst progress towards the ultimate goal of human-like intelligence has been slow, many spinoffs have come in the process. Notable examples include the languages LISP and Prolog, which were invented for AI research but are now used for non-AI tasks. Hacker culture first sprang from AI laboratories, in particular the MIT AI Lab, home at various times to such luminaries as McCarthy, Minsky, Seymour Papert (who developed Logo there), Terry Winograd (who abandoned AI after developing SHRDLU).

Related Topics:
LISP - Prolog - Hacker - MIT AI Lab - Seymour Papert - Logo - Terry Winograd - SHRDLU

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Many other useful systems have been built using technologies that at least once were active areas of AI research. Some examples include:

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• Chinook was declared the Man-Machine World Champion in checkers (draughts) in 1994.
• Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer, beat Garry Kasparov in a famous match in 1997.
• InfoTame, a text analysis search engine developed by the KGB for automatically sorting millions of pages of communications intercepts.
• Fuzzy logic, a technique for reasoning under uncertainty, has been widely used in industrial control systems.
• Expert systems are being used to some extent industrially.
• Machine translation systems such as SYSTRAN are widely used, although results are not yet comparable with human translators.
• Natural language processing
• Neural networks have been used for a wide variety of tasks, from intrusion detection systems to computer games.
• Optical character recognition systems can translate arbitrary typewritten European script into text.
• Handwriting recognition is used in millions of personal digital assistants.
• Speech recognition is commercially available and is widely deployed.
• Computer algebra systems, such as Mathematica and Macsyma, are commonplace.
• Computer vision systems are used in many industrial applications ranging from hardware verification to security systems.
• Program synthesis
• Robotics
• AI planning methods were used to automatically plan the deployment of US forces during Gulf War I. This task would have cost months of time and millions of dollars to perform manually, and DARPA stated that the money saved on this single application was more than their total expenditure on AI research over the last 30 years.

The vision of artificial intelligence replacing human professional judgment has arisen many times in the history of the field, and today in some specialized areas where "expert systems" are routinely used to augment or to replace professional judgment in some areas of engineering and of medicine. An example of an expert system is Clippy the paperclip in Microsoft Office which tried to predict what advice the user would like.

Related Topics:
Expert system - Clippy - Microsoft Office

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