Introduction:

Artificial Intelligence is, in our opinion, the most exciting area of computer s
cience. Artificial Intelligence (or AI, for short) is the name given to any atte
mpt to have computers gain attributes of the human mind.
Of course, this is a very vague statement, and much argument has happened over w
hat exactly constitutes AI (mathematicians and scientists hate vague statements)
. There are essentially two schools of thought: Strong AI and Weak AI.
Weak AI philosophers believe that computers, as advanced as they may get, will o
nly be able to seem intelligent. The responses of the computer may seem like int
elligent actions, but the Weak AI theory insists that the computers are just min
dlessly manipulating data to produce "intelligent" actions. Strong AI philosophe
rs believe that computers someday can be as intelligent as humans.
Of course, the heart of the discussion is this: What is intelligence? Normally,
we declare that humans are the standard for intelligence, but then, isn't human
intelligence, at the very basic level, just a bunch of mindless chemical reactio
ns? Both the Weak AI and the Strong AI have strong supporters, many of them quit
e fanatic.
Aside from the philosophy of the Strong AI and the Weak AI debate, there is also
another, related, division in AI: Connectionism and Classicalism.
Classicalism is the AI that is found in Chess programs, weather diagnostics, and
language processors. Classicalism, also known as the top-down approach, approac
hes AI from the standpoint that human minds are computational by nature, that is
, we manipulate data one piece at a time (serially) through a built in circuitry
in our brains. So, much of the classical approach to AI consists of things like
minimax trees, preprogrammed databases, and prewritten code. Expert systems are
another name for Classical AI.
Connectionism is the newer form of AI. The problem with classicalism, connection
ists say, is that it is too unlike the human mind. The human mind can learn, exp
and, and change, but many of the Expert systems are too rigid and don't learn. C
onnectionism is the AI that the media really likes, which is why it contains man
y famous names like Neural Networks and Parallel Processing. Connectionism seems
a step closer to the human mind, since it uses networks of nodes that seem like
the human brain's network of neurons.
Connectionism, however, also has its flaws. Connectionism is many times inaccura
te and slow, and currently connectionism has failed to reach higher level AI, su
ch as language and some advanced logic, which humans seem to pick up easily in l
ittle time. Human intelligence isn't built from scratch, like the Connectionist
systems often are. So, for those higher-level AI, Classicalism is by far the bet
ter suited. Connectionism, however, is quite successful at modeling lower level
thinking like motor skills, face-recognition, and some vision.
In the end, both viewpoints are valid in both debates. Regardless of the viewpoi
nt, however, the most important goal for AI is that it helps us understand the m
echanisms of the human mind.
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What is Artificial Intelligence?
Intelligence is the ability to think, to imagine, to create, memorize, understan
d, recognize patterns, make choices, adapt to change and learn from experience.
Artificial intelligence is a human endeavor to create a non-organic machine-base
d entity, that has all the above abilities of natural organic intelligence. Henc
e it is called as 'Artificial Intelligence' (AI).
It is the ultimate challenge for an intelligence, to create an equal, another in
telligent being. It is the ultimate form of art, where the artist's creation, no
t only inherits the impressions of his thoughts, but also his ability to think!
How will one recognize artificial intelligence? According to Alan Turing, if you
question a human and an artificially intelligent being and if by their answers,
you can't recognize which is the artificial one, then you have succeeded in cre
ating artificial intelligence. Initial hopes of computer scientists of creating
an artificial intelligence, were dashed hopelessly as they realized how much the
y had underrated the human mind's capabilities!
How do you teach a machine to imagine? They realized that they must understand w
hat makes natural intelligence, the human mind, possible. Only then could they g
et any near to their goal.
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Approaches to AI
Initially, researchers thought that creating an AI would be simply writing progr
ams for each and every function an intelligence performs! As they went on with t
his task, they realized that this approach was too shallow. Even simple function
s like face recognition, spacial sense, pattern recognition and language compreh
ension were beyond their programming skills!
They understood that to create an AI, they must delve deeper into natural intell
igence first. They tried to understand how cognition, comprehension, decision-ma
king happen in the human mind. They had to understand what understanding really
means! Some went into the study of the brain and tried to understand how the net
work of neurons creates the mind.
Thus, researchers branched into different approaches, but they had the same goal
of creating intelligent machines. Let us introduce ourselves to some of the mai
n approaches to artificial intelligence. They are divided into two main lines of
thought, the bottom up and the top down approach:
Neural Networks: This is the bottom up approach. It basically aims at mimicking
the structure and functioning of the human brain, to create intelligent behavior
. Researchers are attempting to build a silicon-based electronic network that is
modeled on the working and form of the human brain! Our brain is a network of b
illions of neurons, each connected with the other.
At an individual level, a neuron has very little intelligence, in the sense that
it operates by a simple set of rules, conducting electric signals through its n
etwork. However, the combined network of all these neurons creates intelligent b
ehavior that is unrivaled and unsurpassed. So these researchers created network
of electronic analogues of a neuron, based on Boolean logic. Memory was recogniz
ed to be an electronic signal pattern in a closed neural network.
How the human brain works is, it learns to realize patterns and remembers them.
Similarly, the neural networks developed have the ability to learn patterns and
remember. This approach has its limitations due to the scale and complexity of d
eveloping an exact replica of a human brain, as the neurons number in billions!
Currently, through simulation techniques, people create virtual neural networks.
This approach has not been able to achieve the ultimate goal but there is a ver
y positive progress in the field. The progress in the development of parallel co
mputing will aid it in the future.
Expert Systems: This is the top down approach. Instead of starting at the base l
evel of neurons, by taking advantage of the phenomenal computational power of th
e modern computers, followers of the expert systems approach are designing intel
ligent machines that solve problems by deductive logic. It is like the dialectic
 approach in philosophy.
This is an intensive approach as opposed to the extensive approach in neural net
works. As the name expert systems suggest, these are machines devoted to solving
problems in very specific niche areas. They have total expertise in a specific
domain of human thought. Their tools are like those of a detective or sleuth. Th
ey are programmed to use statistical analysis and data mining to solve problems.
They arrive at a decision through a logical flow developed by answering yes-no
questions.
Chess computers like Fritz and its successors that beat chess grandmaster Kaspar
ov are examples of expert systems. Chess is known as the drosophila or experimen
tal specimen of artificial intelligence.
Applications of AI
Artificial Intelligence in the form of expert systems and neural networks have a
pplications in every field of human endeavor. They combine precision and computa
tional power with pure logic, to solve problems and reduce error in operation. A
lready, robot expert systems are taking over many jobs in industries that are da
ngerous for or beyond human ability. Some of the applications divided by domains
are as follows:
Heavy Industries and Space: Robotics and cybernetics have taken a leap combined
with artificially intelligent expert systems. An entire manufacturing process is
now totally automated, controlled and maintained by a computer system in car ma
nufacture, machine tool production, computer chip production and almost every hi
gh-tech process. They carry out dangerous tasks like handling hazardous radioact
ive materials. Robotic pilots carry out complex maneuvering techniques of unmann
ed spacecrafts sent in space. Japan is the leading country in the world in terms
of robotics research and use.
Finance: Banks use intelligent software applications to screen and analyze finan
cial data. Softwares that can predict trends in the stock market have been creat
ed which have been known to beat humans in predictive power.
Computer Science: Researchers in quest of artificial intelligence have created s
pin offs like dynamic programming, object oriented programming, symbolic program
ming, intelligent storage management systems and many more such tools. The prima
ry goal of creating an artificial intelligence still remains a distant dream but
people are getting an idea of the ultimate path which could lead to it.
Aviation: Air lines use expert systems in planes to monitor atmospheric conditio
ns and system status. The plane can be put on auto pilot once a course is set fo
r the destination.
Weather Forecast: Neural networks are used for predicting weather conditions. Pr
evious data is fed to a neural network which learns the pattern and uses that kn
owledge to predict weather patterns.
Swarm Intelligence: This is an approach to, as well as application of artificial
intelligence similar to a neural network. Here, programmers study how intellige
nce emerges in natural systems like swarms of bees even though on an individual
level, a bee just follows simple rules. They study relationships in nature like
the prey-predator relationships that give an insight into how intelligence emerg
es in a swarm or collection from simple rules at an individual level. They devel
op intelligent systems by creating agent programs that mimic the behavior of the
se natural systems!
Is artificial Intelligence really possible? Can an intelligence like a human min
d surpass itself and create its own image? The depth and the powers of the human
mind are just being tapped. Who knows, it might be possible, only time can tell
! Even if such an intelligence is created, will it share our sense of morals and
justice, will it share our idiosyncrasies? This will be the next step in the ev
olution of intelligence. Hope I have succeeded in conveying to you the excitemen
t and possibilities this subject holds!
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Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science which aims at building m
achines that can think, feel and take decisions just like humans do. Before disc
ussing artificial intelligence's future, let's understand exactly what artificia
l Intelligence is all about.
Computers have made our lives very easy. They can perform tasks at the speed of
one click which we humans would take hours to do. On top of that they are much m
ore efficient than humans, and unlike humans, never feel exhausted. However, the
y lack the potential to make a complex decision, especially pertaining to a real
world problem. Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that mak
es the computers capable enough to perform complex tasks, i.e. tasks that requir
e reasoning and intelligence, and understand the real life situations based on p
ast experience, just like humans do. Artificial intelligence is a very broad fie
ld and includes not just computers but all the intelligent machines. Read more o
n pros and cons of artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence - Current Usage
There are many applications of artificial intelligence at present. Some of them
have been listed here.
Banks and other financial institutions rely on intelligent software, which provi
de accurate analysis of the data and helps make predictions based upon that data
.
Stocks and commodities are being traded without any human interference - all tha
nks to the intelligent systems.
Artificial intelligence is used for weather forecasting.
It is used by airlines to keep a check on its system.
Robotics is the greatest success story, in the field of artificial intelligence.
Spacecrafts are send by NASA and other space organizations into space, which ar
e completely manned by robots. Even some manufacturing processes are now being c
ompletely undertaken by robots. Robots are being used in industrial processes, t
hat are dangerous to human beings, such as in nuclear power plants.
Usage of artificial intelligence is quite evident in various speech recognition
systems, such as IBM ViaVoice software and Windows Vista.
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Artificial Intelligence's Future Usage
What is the future of artificial intelligence? Can machines ever be as thoughtfu
l, self-aware and intelligent as human beings? The answer to both these question
s is inter-related.
Artificial intelligence in the future will churn out machines and computers, whi
ch are much more sophisticated than the ones that we have today. For example, th
e speech recognition systems that we see today, will become more sophisticated a
nd it is expected that they will reach the human performance levels in the futur
e. It is also believed that they will be able to communicate with human beings,
using both text and voice, in unstructured English in the coming few years. Howe
ver, will artificial intelligence be able to create machines that are self-aware
and even more intelligent than human beings - is a question that nobody has an
answer to. Also, even if this is possible, how much time it is going to take, ca
nnot be predicted at present.
It is expected that in the future, such machines will be developed having basic
common sense, similar to human beings, although pertaining to specific areas onl
y. It is also expected that the human mind functions, such as learning by experi
ence, learning by rehearsal, cognition and perception will also be performed by
future intelligent machines. In fact, research and experiments are being conduct
ed to recreate the human brain. CCortex , a project by Artificial Development In
c., California, and Swiss government's IBM sponsored Blue Brain Project, are two
main ventures, whose goal is to simulate the human brain. Whether this brain wi
ll have human consciousness incorporated in it - there is still no answer for th
at. Read more on artificial intelligence and the future of man.
It is expected that the robots in future, will take on everybody's work. Whether
it is office work or the work at home, robots will accomplish it even more fast
er and efficiently than human beings. So if somebody's falling ill, they can obt
ain a robot nurse who will give periodic medicines to them. How much care, conce
rn and empathy the robot nurse will have towards the patient is anybody's guess!
Read more on disadvantages of artificial intelligence.
Thus, artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, and artificial intelligen
ce's future depends upon the capability of the scientists to crack the puzzle of
the human mind. Will they be able to solve "the problem of the mind" and incorp
orate all the human, mental, emotional qualities in the machines? Let's wait and
watch!
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*Deduction, reasoning, problem solving
Early AI researchers developed algorithms that imitated the step-by-step reasoni
ng that humans were often assumed to use when they solve puzzles, play board gam
es or make logical deductions.*[35] By the late 1980s and '90s, AI research had
also developed highly successful methods for dealing with uncertain or incomplet
e information, employing concepts from probability and economics.[36]
*For difficult problems, most of these algorithms can require enormous computati
onal resources most experience a "combinatorial explosion": the amount of memory
or computer time required becomes astronomical when the problem goes beyond a c
ertain size. The search for more efficient problem solving algorithms is a high
priority for AI research.*[37]
*Human beings solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive judgments rathe
r than the conscious, step-by-step deduction that early AI research was able to
model.*[38] AI has made some progress at imitating this kind of "sub-symbolic" p
roblem solving: embodied agent approaches emphasize the importance of sensorimot
or skills to higher reasoning; neural net research attempts to simulate the stru
ctures inside human and animal brains that give rise to this skill.
[edit]*Knowledge representation*
Main articles: Knowledge representation and Commonsense knowledge
*Knowledge representation and knowledge engineering are central to AI research.
Many of the problems machines are expected to solve will require extensive knowl
edge 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. A complete rep
resentation of "what exists" is an ontology of which the most general are called
upper ontologies*
Among the most difficult problems in knowledge representation are:
Default reasoning and the qualification problem
Many of the things people know take the form of "working assumptions." For examp
le, if a bird comes up in conversation, people typically picture an animal that
is fist sized, sings, and flies. None of these things are true about all birds.
John McCarthy identified this problem in 1969[46] as the qualification problem:
for any commonsense rule that AI researchers care to represent, there tend to be
a huge number of exceptions. Almost nothing is simply true or false in the way
that abstract logic requires. AI research has explored a number of solutions to
this problem.[47]
*The breadth of commonsense knowledge
The number of atomic facts that the average person knows is astronomical. Resear
ch projects that attempt to build a complete knowledge base of commonsense knowl
edge (e.g., Cyc) require enormous amounts of laborious ontological engineering t
hey must be built, by hand, one complicated concept at a time.A major goal is to
have the computer understand enough concepts to be able to learn by reading fro
m sources like the internet, and thus be able to add to its own ontology*[citati
on needed]
The subsymbolic form of some commonsense knowledge
Much of what people know is not represented as "facts" or "statements" that they
could express verbally. For example, a chess master will avoid a particular che
ss position because it "feels too exposed"[49] or an art critic can take one loo
k at a statue and instantly realize that it is a fake.[50] These are intuitions
or tendencies that are represented in the brain non-consciously and sub-symbolic
ally.[51] Knowledge like this informs, supports and provides a context for symbo
lic, conscious knowledge. As with the related problem of sub-symbolic reasoning,
it is hoped that situated AI or computational intelligence will provide ways to
represent this kind of knowledge.[51]
[edit]Planning
Main article: *Automated planning and scheduling
Intelligent agents must be able to set goals and achieve them. They need a way t
o visualize the future (they must have a representation of the state of the worl
d and be able to make predictions about how their actions will change it) and be
able to make choices that maximize the utility (or "value") of the available ch
oices.*[53]
In classical planning problems, the agent can assume that it is the only thing a
cting on the world and it can be certain what the consequences of its actions ma
y be.[54] 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, r
equiring the agent to reason under uncertainty.[55]
Multi-agent planning uses the cooperation and competition of many agents to achi
eve a given goal. Emergent behavior such as this is used by evolutionary algorit
hms and swarm intelligence.[56]
[edit]Learning
Main article: *Machine learning
Machine learning has been central to AI research from the beginning. Unsupervise
d learning is the ability to find patterns in a stream of input. Supervised lear
ning includes both classification and numerical regression. Classification is us
ed to determine what category something belongs in, after seeing a number of exa
mples of things from several categories. *Regression takes a set of numerical in
put/output examples and attempts to discover a continuous function that would ge
nerate the outputs from the inputs. In reinforcement learning[59] the agent is r
ewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones. These can be analyzed in t
erms of decision theory, using concepts like utility. The mathematical analysis
of machine learning algorithms and their performance is a branch of theoretical
computer science known as computational learning theory.[60]
[edit]Natural language processing

AI uses sensors and intelligent algorithms to avoid obstacles and navigate stair
s.
Main article: *Natural language processing
Natural language processing gives machines the ability to read and understand th
e languages that humans speak. Many researchers hope that a sufficiently powerfu
l natural language processing system would be able to acquire knowledge on its o
wn, by reading the existing text available over the internet. Some straightforwa
rd applications of natural language processing include information retrieval (or
text mining) and machine translation.*[62]
[edit]Motion and manipulation
Main article:* Robotics
The field of robotics is closely related to AI. Intelligence is required for rob
ots to be able to handle such tasks as object manipulation and navigation, with
sub-problems of localization (knowing where you are), mapping (learning what is
around you) and motion planning.*
[edit]Perception
Main articles: *Machine perception, Computer vision, and Speech recognition
Machine perception is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras, mi
crophones, sonar and others more exotic) to deduce aspects of the world. Compute
r vision is the ability to analyze visual input. A few selected subproblems are
speech recognition,facial recognition and object recognition.*
[edit]Social intelligence
Main article: Affective computing

Kismet, a robot with rudimentary social skills

Emotion and social skills[70] play two roles for an intelligent agent. First, 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, a
s well as the ability to model human emotions and the perceptual skills to detec
t emotions.) Also, for good human-computer interaction, an intelligent machine a
lso needs to display emotions. At the very least it must appear polite and sensi
tive to the humans it interacts with. At best, it should have normal emotions it
self.*
[edit]Creativity
Main article: *Computational 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, or systems that i
dentify and assess creativity). A related area of computational research is Arti
ficial Intuition and Artificial Imagination.*[citation needed]
[edit]General intelligence
Main articles: Strong AI and AI-complete
Most researchers hope that their work will eventually be incorporated into a mac
hine with general intelligence (known as strong AI), combining all the skills ab
ove and exceeding human abilities at most or all of them.[13] A few believe that
anthropomorphic features like artificial consciousness or an artificial brain m
ay be required for such a project.[71][72]
Many of the problems above are considered AI-complete: to solve one problem, you
must solve them all. For example, even a straightforward, specific task like ma
chine translation requires that the machine follow the author's argument (reason
), know what is being talked about (knowledge), and faithfully reproduce the aut
hor's intention (social intelligence). Machine translation, therefore, is believ
ed to be AI-complete: it may require strong AI to be done as well as humans can
do it.[73]