Sunday, January 6, 2008

Artificial Intelligence: The Technology of Modern Era

Artificial intelligence is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable. Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world.

Computer programs have plenty of speed and memory but their abilities correspond to the intellectual mechanisms that program designers understand well enough to put in programs. Some abilities that children normally don't develop till they are teenagers may be in, and some abilities possessed by two year olds are still out. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the cognitive sciences still have not succeeded in determining exactly what the human abilities are. Very likely the organization of the intellectual mechanisms for AI can usefully be different from that in people.
The list of some branches of Artificial Intelligence is following: -

Logical AI
What a program knows about the world in general the facts of the specific situation in which it must act, and its goals are all represented by sentences of some mathematical logical language.

Search
AI programs often examine large numbers of possibilities, e.g. moves in a chess game or inferences by a theorem proving program. Discoveries are continually made about how to do this more efficiently in various domains.

Pattern recognition
When a program makes observations of some kind, it is often programmed to compare what it sees with a pattern. For example, a vision program may try to match a pattern of eyes and a nose in a scene in order to find a face.

Representation
Facts about the world have to be represented in some way. Usually languages of mathematical logic are used.

Inference
From some facts, others can be inferred. Mathematical logical deduction is adequate for some purposes, but new methods of non-monotonic inference have been added to logic since the 1970s.

Common sense knowledge and reasoning
This is the area in which AI is farthest from human-level, in spite of the fact that it has been an active research area since the 1950s. While there has been considerable progress, e.g. in developing systems of non-monotonic reasoning and theories of action, yet more new ideas are needed.

Learning from experience
Programs do that. The approaches to AI based on connectionism and neural nets specialize in that. There is also learning of laws expressed in logic.

Planning
Planning programs start with general facts about the world (especially facts about the effects of actions), facts about the particular situation and a statement of a goal. From these, they generate a strategy for achieving the goal.

Epistemology
This is a study of the kinds of knowledge that are required for solving problems in the world.

Ontology
Ontology is the study of the kinds of things that exist. In AI, the programs and sentences deal with various kinds of objects, and we study what these kinds are and what their basic properties are.

Heuristics
A heuristic is a way of trying to discover something or an idea imbedded in a program. The term is used variously in AI. Heuristic predicates that compare two nodes in a search tree to see if one is better than the other, i.e. constitutes an advance toward the goal, may be more useful.

Genetic programming
Genetic programming is a technique for getting programs to solve a task by mating random Lisp programs and selecting fittest in millions of generations.

The ultimate effort is to make computer programs that can solve problems and achieve goals in the world as well as humans. However, many people involved in particular research areas are much less ambitious.

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