artificial intelligence

artificial intelligence (AI) The subfield of computer

science concerned with the concepts and methods of symbolicinference by computer and symbolic knowledge representation

for use in making inferences. AI can be seen as an attempt to

model aspects of human thought on computers. It is also

sometimes defined as trying to solve by computer any problem

that a human can solve faster. The term was coined by

Stanford Professor John McCarthy, a leading AI researcher.

Examples of AI problems are computer vision (building a

system that can understand images as well as a human) and

natural language processing (building a system that can

understand and speak a human language as well as a human).

These may appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (1993)

to solve them have foundered on the amount of context

information and "intelligence" they seem to require.

The term is often used as a selling point, e.g. to describe

programming that drives the behaviour of computer characters

in a game. This is often no more intelligent than "Kill any

humans you see; keep walking; avoid solid objects; duck if a

human with a gun can see you".

See also AI-complete, neats vs. scruffies, neuralnetwork, genetic programming, fuzzy computing,

artificial life.

ACM SIGART . U Cal Davis. CMU ArtificialIntelligence Repository.

(2002-01-19)