What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not something new, it first appeared in 1956 and is defined by a Stanford researcher, John McCarthy as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs”. Principally, it refers to the capability of a computer that can mimic human's learning and thinking ability. While it is described as a horrible army that would destroy the life of the human, there are many people making use of AI to help them solve problems smartly.

AI is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals. A typical AI perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.

Artificial Intelligence vs Natural Intelligence

An AI's intended goal function can be simple or complex. A simple goal can be explicitly defined or can be induced such as "1 if the AI wins a game, 0 otherwise". If the AI is programmed for "reinforcement learning", goals can be implicitly induced by rewarding some types of behavior and punishing others.

The problems that AI can solve:

-          Reasoning

-          Problem-solving

-          Knowledge representation

-          Planning

-          Learning

-          Natural language processing

-          Perception

-          Motion and manipulation

-          Social intelligence

-          General intelligence

Artificial Intelligence Application

Many people get confused with machine learning and AI, machine learning can be considered as a subset of AI. AI is a bunch of technologies. Chatbots, neural networks, and autonomous systems are some common examples of AI. Machine learning is indeed a part of AI's technology landscape, and it is more focused on building computer programs that can learn the skills by themselves given access to information or data. (More will be discussed in the next post.)