INDEX

 Definition  Introduction  Bringing Common Sense, Expert Knowledge, and Superhuman Reasoning to Computers  Historical Perspective  Configuring Hardware and Software  Diagnosing and Treating Problems  Problems of AI  Approaches to AI  Tools of AI research  Evaluating artificial intelligence  Applications of artificial intelligence  The Future

Definition:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is both the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it. Major AI textbooks define artificial intelligence as "the study and design of intelligent agents. where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success.

Introduction:
AI can be seen as a realization of an abstract intelligent agent (AIA) which exhibits the functional essence of intelligence. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.
 Among the traits that researchers hope machines will exhibit are reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, communication, perception and the ability to move and manipulate objects.  General intelligence (or "strong AI") has not yet been achieved and is a long-term goal of AI research.  AI research also overlaps with tasks such as robotics, control systems, scheduling, data mining, logistics, recognition, and many others. Other names for the field have been proposed, such as computational intelligence, synthetic intelligence, intelligent systems.

Bringing Common Sense, Expert Knowledge, and Superhuman Reasoning to Computers:

 Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the key technology in many of today's novel applications, ranging from banking systems that detect attempted credit card fraud, to telephone systems that understand speech, to software systems that notice when you're having problems and offer appropriate advice.  In a 1977 article, the late AI pioneer Allen Newell foresaw a time when the entire man-made world would be permeated by systems that cushioned us from dangers and increased our abilities: Smart vehicles, roads, bridges, homes, offices, appliances, even clothes.

Historical Perspective:
 Early work in AI focused on using cognitive and biological models to simulate and explain human information processing skills, on "logical" systems that perform common-sense and expert reasoning, and on robots that perceive and interact with their environment.  Today developers can build systems that meet the advanced information processing needs of government and industry by choosing from a broad palette of mature technologies.  AI ideas also have been adopted by other computer scientists - for example, "data mining," which combines ideas from databases, AI learning, and statistics to yield systems that find interesting patterns in large databases, given only very broad guidelines.

Configuring Hardware and Software :

 AI systems configure custom computer, communications, and manufacturing systems, guaranteeing the purchaser maximum efficiency and minimum setup time, while providing the seller with superhuman expertise in tracking the rapid technological evolution of system components and specifications.  These systems detect order incompleteness and inconsistencies, employing large bodies of knowledge that describe the complex interactions of system components.  Systems currently deployed process billions of dollars of orders annually; the estimated value of the market leader in this area is over a billion dollars.

Diagnosing and Treating Problems :

 Systems that diagnose and treat problems -whether illnesses in people or problems in hardware and software -- are now in widespread use. Diagnostic systems based on AI technology are being built into photocopiers, computer operating systems, and office automation tools to reduce service calls.  Stand-alone units are being used to monitor and control operations in factories and office buildings. AI-based systems assist physicians in many kinds of medical diagnosis, in prescribing treatments, and in monitoring patient responses.

Problems of AI:
While there is no universally accepted definition of intelligence,AI researchers have studied several traits that are considered essential. Deduction, reasoning, problem solving

o Early AI researchers developed algorithms that

imitated the process of conscious, step-by-step reasoning that human beings use when they solve puzzles, play board games, or make logical deductions. o By the late 80s and 90s, AI research had also developed highly successful methods for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics.

Knowledge Representation:
 Knowledge representation and engineering are central to AI research. Many of the problems machines are expected to solve will require extensive knowledge about the world. Among the things that AI needs to represent are: objects, properties, categories and relations between objects; situations, events, states and time;causes and effects; knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what other people know);and many other, less well researched domains.

Planning:
 Intelligent agents must be able to set goals and achieve them. They need a way to visualize the future: they must have a representation of the state of the world and be able to make predictions about how their actions will change it. They must also attempt to determine the utility or "value" of the choices available to it.  In some planning problems, the agent can assume that it is the only thing acting on the world and it can be certain what the consequences of its actions may be.However, if this is not true, it must periodically check if the world matches its predictions and it must change its plan as this becomes necessary, requiring the agent to reason under uncertainty.

Learning:
Important machine learning problems are:
o Unsupervised learning: find a model that matches a stream of input "experiences", and be able to predict what new "experiences" to expect. o Supervised learning, such as classification (be able to determine what category something belongs in, after seeing a number of examples of things from each category), or regression (given a set of numerical input/output examples, discover a continuous function that would generate the outputs from the inputs). o Reinforcement learning: the agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones. (These can be analyzed in terms decision theory, using concepts like utility).

Natural language processing:

Natural language processing gives machines the ability to read and understand the languages human beings speak.
Motion and manipulation:

ASIMO uses sensors and intelligent algorithms to avoid obstacles and navigate stairs.

Perception:
 Machine perception is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras, microphones, sonar and others more exotic) to deduce aspects of the world. Computer vision is the ability to analyze visual input.  A few selected sub problems are speech recognition, facial recognition and object recognition.

Social intelligence:
Emotion and social skills play two roles for an intelligent agent:  It must be able to predict the actions of others, by understanding their motives and emotional states. (This involves elements of game theory, decision theory, as well as the ability to model human emotions and the perceptual skills to detect emotions.)  For good human-computer interaction, an intelligent machine also needs to display emotions at the very least it must appear polite and sensitive to the humans it interacts with. At best, it should appear to have normal emotions itself.

Creativity:
 A sub-field of AI addresses creativity both theoretically (from a philosophical and psychological perspective) and practically (via specific implementations of systems that generate outputs that can be considered creative).

General intelligence:
Most researchers hope that their work will eventually be incorporated into a machine with general intelligence (known as strong AI), combining all the skills above and exceeding human abilities at most or all of them. A few believe that anthropomorphic features like artificial consciousness or an artificial brain may be required for such a project.

Approaches to AI:
There are as many approaches to AI as there are AI researchersany coarse categorization is likely to be unfair to someone. Artificial intelligence communities have grown up around particular problems, institutions and researchers, as well as the theoretical insights that define the approaches described below. oCybernetics and brain simulation oTraditional symbolic AI oSub-symbolic AI oIntelligent agent paradigm oIntegrating the approaches

Tools of AI research:
In the course of 50 years of research, AI has developed a large number of tools to solve the most difficult problems in computer science. A few of the most general of these methods are discussed below. oSearch oLogic oProbabilistic methods for uncertain reasoning oClassifiers and statistical learning method oNeural networks oSocial and emergent models oControl theory oSpecialized languages

Evaluating artificial intelligence:

Artificial intelligence can also be evaluated on specific problems such as small problems in chemistry, hand-writing recognition and game-playing. Such tests have been termed subject matter expert Turing tests. Smaller problems provide more achievable goals and there are an ever-increasing number of positive results.The broad classes of outcome for an AI test are:

o optimal: it is not possible to perform better o strong super-human: performs better than all humans o super-human: performs better than most humans o sub-human: performs worse than most humans

Applications of artificial intelligence:

 Artificial intelligence has successfully been used in a wide range of fields including medical diagnosis, stock trading, robot control, law, scientific discovery and toys. Frequently, when a technique reaches mainstream use it is no longer considered artificial intelligence, sometimes described as the AI effect.

The Future:
AI began as an attempt to answer some of the most fundamental questions about human existence by understanding the nature of intelligence, but it has grown into a scientific and technological field affecting many aspects of commerce and society.