What is Artificial Intelligence?

What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence was born in the 1950s when a handful of pioneers in the newly emerging field of computer science began to ask whether computers could think. A brief definition: “The attempt to automate intellectual tasks that are normally performed by humans.”
AI is a very broad term that encompasses both machine and deep learning, as well as many other approaches.

Here are several now-classic definitions of AI:

“The study of mental faculties through computational models.”
(Charniak and McDermott, 1985)

“The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people.” (Kurzweil, 1990)

“The study of how to make computers do things that, at the moment, people are better at.” (Rich and Knight, 1991)

“The study of computations that enable perception, understanding, and action.”
(Winston, 1992)

And now a perspective from a book I bought yesterday, which is being published this year:

“The primary goal of AI is to provide a set of algorithms and techniques that can be used to solve problems that humans perform intuitively and automatically, but which are challenging for computers. A great example of such a class of problems in AI is the interpretation and understanding of image content – a task that a human can accomplish with little effort, but is immensely difficult for machines.”
Dr. Adrian Rosebrock 2017 (Deep Learning for Computer Vision)

What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence was born in the 1950s when a handful of pioneers…

Published by Artificial Intelligence on 29 November 2017