What is Artificial Intelligence?

The term AI for Artificial Intelligence seems to be thrown around a lot but what is it exactly? To clear things up, first of all let's look at the definition, to avoid confusion we have to go back to the earliest and hence purest definition of AI from the time when it was first invented the official idea and definition of AI was first made by Jay McCartney in 1955 at the Dartmouth. McCarthy proposed “Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it an attempt will be made to find out how to make machines use language form abstractions and concepts solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans and improve themselves.” In essence AI is a machine with the ability to solve problems that are usually done by us humans with our natural intelligence a computer would demonstrate a form of intelligence when it learns how to improve itself at solving these problems. To elaborate further the 1955 proposal defines seven areas of AI today they're surely more but here are the original seven: 1) Simulating higher functions of the human brain. 2) Programming a computer to use general language. 3) Arranging hypothetical neurons in a manner enabling them to form concepts. 4) A way to determine and measure problem complexity. 5) Self-improvement. 6). Abstraction: Defined as the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events. 7) Randomness and creativity. After 60 years we've completed the language measure problem complexity and self-improvement to at least some degree. However, randomness and creativity are just starting to be explored this year we've seen a couple of web episode scripts short films and even a feature-length film co-written or completely written by AI. According to Jack Copeland who has written several books on AI some of the most important factors of intelligence are generalization learning, that is learning that enables the learner to be able to perform better in situations not previously encountered. Reasoning to reason is to draw conclusions appropriate to the situation in hand. Problem solving given such and such data find X. Perception analyzing ask and environment and analyzing features and relationships between objects self-driving cars are an example. Language understanding language by following syntax and other rules similar to a human.

Few examples of AI are machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, robotics, pattern recognition and knowledge management. There are also different types of artificial intelligence in terms of approach for example the strong AI and weak AI. Strong AI is simulating the human brain by building systems that think and, in the process, give us an insight into how the brain works while weak AI is a system that behaves like a human but doesn't give us an insight into how the brain works. IBM's deep blue a chess-playing AI was an example it processed millions of moves before it made any actual moves on the chessboard. It doesn't stop there though there's actually a new kind of middle ground between strong and weak AI this is where a system is inspired by human reasoning but doesn't have to stick to it

IBM's Watson is an example like humans it reads a lot of information recognizes patterns and builds up evidence to say hey I'm X percent confident that this is the right solution to the question that you have asked me from the information that I've read. Google's deep learning is similar as it mimics the structure of the human brain by using neural networks but doesn't follow its function exactly. The system uses nodes that act as artificial neurons connecting information, neural networks are actually a subset of machine learning. Machine Learning refers to algorithms that enable software to improve its performance over time as it obtains more data this is programming by input-output examples rather than just coding. Let's use an example, A programmer would have no idea how to program a computer to recognize a dog but he can create a program with a form of intelligence that can learn to do so if he gives the program enough image data in the form of dogs and let it process and learn. When you give the program an image of a new dog that it's never seen before it would be able to tell that it's a dog with relative ease.

Most artificial intelligence algorithms are expert systems so what's an expert system the often cited definition of an expert system is as follows:
An expert system is a system that employs human knowledge in a computer to solve problems that ordinarily inquire human expertise. Basically, it's the practical application of a knowledge database we've arguably only just got the first proven non-expert system this year deep mind’s AlphaGo. AlphaGo is not an expert system meaning that its algorithms could be used and applied to other things. Demis Hassabis was the co-creator of Deep Mind highlighted this in a Google Blog “We are thrilled to have mastered go and thus achieved one of the grand challenges of AI however the most significant aspect of all of this for us is that AlphaGo isn't just an expert system built on handcrafted rules instead it uses general machine learning techniques to figure out for itself how to win go.” Because the methods “we've used a general-purpose our hope is that one day they could be extended to help us address some of society's toughest and most pressing problems from climate modeling to complex disease analysis.” In other words, the algorithms AlphaGo used could serve as a basis to be applied to very complex problems.

Let’s bring this all together and summarize all that we've read, So, what is AI? Commonly AI or artificial intelligence is a machine or a computer program that learns how to do tasks that require forms of intelligence and are usually done by humans and the other thing to take away intelligence comes in many forms and has many different aspects at this time we just have many different types of AI’s that are good at particular subsets of intelligence. So anyway, I hope that clears things up as a lot of people were confused about what AI.