What is Artificial Intelligence?

What is Artificial Intelligence, well Wikipedia says and I quote - Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines."

#-Link-Snipped-#So what is it exactly? Is it a machine or is it a brain? Well, it is a machine with a brain of its own. How nice it would be if your vacuum cleaner could sense the dirt on its own and start working as soon as some settlements of dust make an entry into your living room? Well, artificial intelligence makes it possible. When you play a game against computer, who decides how does the computer play? It is pre-programmed to do so right? That's what is called as Artificial Intelligence.

So with artificial intelligence machines can be programed to take decisions and behave in a certain way based on their processing of the information. So if you are driving a car with artificial intelligence programmed into it, the wipers would start functioning as soon as the rain starts to fall, your headlights would be turned on as soon as the light intensity goes down. Maybe the brakes with artificial intelligence would function on their own as soon as you come within striking distance of another vehicle. It is a vast field of research in computer science and an interesting one too. It has applications in making appliances for the disabled, pre programmed devices and software that can act like humans and in a whole host of scenarios where dynamic decisions are to be made.

There are limitations to it and one of them is that there are still many tasks that need human intervention. Decision making under uncertainty is one such example where artificial intelligence can fail. A lot of progress has been made on this and there is another term artificial artificial intelligence. There is a new program called Amazon Mechanical Turk, through which a computer can ask humans to perform tasks that it can’t do itself. More on Artificial Artificial Intelligence in my next post. Till then enjoy building on real intelligence through knowledge by reading VoiCE.