Artificial intelligence (AI) is when machines demonstrate intelligence, which perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information.
Tasks, which is done by AI include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs. The Oxford English Dictionary defines artificial intelligence as:
“the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.”
AI applications include
- advanced web search engines (e.g., Google),
- recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, Netflix),
- understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa),
- self-driving cars (e.g., Waymo),
- automated decision-making and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go).
Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956. AI research tried and discarded many different approaches since its founding e.g.: simulating the brain, modeling human problem solving, formal logic, large databases of knowledge and imitating animal behavior.
In the first decades of the 21st century, highly mathematical-statistical machine learning dominated the field. This technique proved that highly successful in helping to solve many challenging problems throughout industry and academia.
Various sub-fields of AI research centered around particular goals and the use of tools. Traditional goals of AI research include reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception, and the ability to move and manipulate objects.
General intelligence (the ability to solve an arbitrary problem) is the field’s long-term goal. To solve these problems, AI researchers adapted and integrated a wide range of problem-solving techniques. Including search and mathematical optimization, formal logic, artificial neural networks. And methods based on statistics, probability and economics.