Artificial intelligence - Brief Introduction

The field of artificial intelligence attempts not just to understands but also, to build intelligent entities. Currently Artificial intelligence covering a huge variety of sub-fields from general to the specific. Such as, playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, writing poetry, driving a car on a crowded street, and diagnosing diseases.

Definitions of Artificial intelligence by four different approach. All four approaches to AI are followed by different people with different methods.

#1. Thinking Humanly - 
The exciting new effort to make computers to think machines with minds in the full and literal sense.

#2. Acting Humanly - 

The art of creating machines the perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people.

#3. Thinking Rationally - 

The study of computations that make it possible to perceive, reason, and act.

#4. Acting Rationally -

Computational intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent agents. In other words, AI is concerned with intelligent behavior in artifacts.

[Note - The right measurement against an ideal performance measure, is called rationality. A system is rational if it does the "right things", what it knows.]

For performing a task. the computer need to posses the following capabilities :

i. Natural language processing - It enables to communicate successfully in English.

ii. Knowledge representation - For storing what it knows or hears.

iii. Automated reasoning - For using the stores information to answer the questions and drawing the new conclusions.

iv. Machine learning - For adapting new circumstances and detecting and extrapolate patterns. 

v. Computer vision - For perceiving objects.

vi. Robotics - ;The use of robotics to manipulate objects and move about.

Above all composes most of AI.

What can AI do today ?

There are so many activities in so many sub-fields, where artificial intelligence in being implemented. Here some applications are: 

#1. Robotic vehicles -  A driverless robotic car named STANLEY sped through terrain of Mojave desert at 22 mph, finishes the 132 mile driving and won the 2005 DARPA grand challenge. STANLEY is a Volkswagen Touareg outfitted with cameras, radar and laser rangefinders to sense the environment and on-board software to command the steering, braking, and acceleration. 

#2. Speech Recognition - For an example, A traveler can book flight by conversation guided by an automated speech recognition and dialog management system.

#3. Autonomous planning and scheduling - NASA's Remote agent program became the first on-board autonomous planning program to control the scheduling of operations for a spacecraft. REMOTE AGENTS generated plans from high level goals specified from the ground and monitored the execution of those plans - detecting, diagnosing, and recovering from problems.

#4. Game Playing - IBM's DEEP BLUE became the first computer program  to defeat the world champion (Garry Kasparov ) in a chess match. Kasparov said that he felt a "new kind of intelligence" across the board from him.  This is showing level of intelligence developed as artificial intellect.

#5. Logistics planning - In 1991, U.S. force  deployed a Dynamic Analysis and re-planning tool, DART, to do automated logistics planning and scheduling for transportation. This involved up to 50,000 vehicles, cargo and people at a time and had to account for starting point, destinations, routes, and conflict resolution among all parameters. The AI planning techniques generated a plan in hours that can take weeks with older methods.

#6. Machine Translation - For an example, A computer program automatically translates from Arabic to English. The program uses a statistical model built from Arabic to English translations and English text totaling about two trillion words. None of the computer scientist in the team speak Arabic, but they can understand statistics and machine learning algorithms. 

AI is advancing more rapidly from past decades because of greater use of the scientific method in experimenting with and comparing approaches. The sub-fields of AI becomes more integrated and AI has found common ground with other disciplines.