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What is Artificial Intelligence?
How does Artificial Intelligence work?
The Future of AI
The four types of Artificial Intelligence
How is AI used? Examples of Artificial Intelligence
Why is Artificial Intelligence important?
Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is a broad branch of computer science concerned with building intelligent machines capable of performing tasks that normally require human intelligence.
How does Artificial Intelligence work?
Less than a decade after helping the Allied forces win french email address list War II by cracking the Nazi Enigma encryption machine, mathematician Alan Turing changed history for the second time with a simple question: “Can machines think?”
Turing's 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and its subsequent Turing Test established the fundamental goal and vision of AI.
At its core, AI is the branch of computer science that aims to answer Turing’s question in the affirmative. It is the effort to replicate or simulate human intelligence in machines. The expansive goal of AI has given rise to many questions and debates. So much so that no single definition of the field is universally accepted.
Can machines think? – Alan Turing, 1950
Defining AI
The main limitation of defining AI as simply “building intelligent machines” is that it doesn’t really explain what AI is and what makes a machine intelligent. AI is an interdisciplinary science with many approaches, but advances in machine learning and deep learning are creating a paradigm shift in virtually every sector of the technology industry.
However, several new tests have been proposed recently and have been widely welcomed, including a 2019 research paper titled “On the Measure of Intelligence.” In the paper, veteran deep learning researcher and Google engineer François Chollet argues that intelligence is the “rate at which a learner transforms experience and background into new skills in valuable tasks that involve uncertainty and adaptation.” In other words: The most intelligent systems are able to take just a small amount of experience and guess what the outcome would be in many different situations.
Meanwhile, in their book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, authors Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig approach the concept of AI by unifying their work around the theme of intelligent agents in machines. With this in mind, AI is “the study of agents that receive perceptions from the environment and perform actions.”
Artificial Intelligence Defined: Four Types of Approaches
⦁ Thinking humanly: imitating thinking based on the human mind.
⦁ Thinking rationally: imitating thinking based on logical reasoning.
⦁ Act humanly: act in a way that imitates human behavior.
⦁ Act rationally: act in a way that achieves a specific objective
The first two ideas concern thought and reasoning processes, while the others deal with behavior. Norvig and Russell focus particularly on rational agents acting to achieve the best outcome, noting that “all the abilities required for the Turing Test also enable an agent to act rationally.”
MIT professor of AI and computer science Patrick Winston defined AI as “algorithms enabled by constraints, exposed by representations that support loop-driven models that unite thought, perception, and action.”
While these definitions may seem abstract to the average person, they help focus the field as an area of computer science and provide a blueprint for infusing machines and programs with ML and other subsets of AI.