Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. Leading AI textbooks define the field as the study of “intelligent agents”: any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals. Some popular accounts use the term “artificial intelligence” to describe machines that mimic “cognitive” functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as “learning” and “problem solving”, however, this definition is rejected by major AI researchers.
AI applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Tesla), automated decision-making and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go). As machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered to require “Intelligence” are often removed from the definition of AI, a phenomenon known as the AI effect. For instance, optical character recognition is frequently excluded from things considered to be AI, having become a routine technology.
Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, and in the years since has experienced several waves of optimism, followed by disappointment and the loss of funding (known as an “AI winter“), followed by new approaches, success and renewed funding. AI research has tried and discarded many different approaches since its founding, including 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 has dominated the field, and this technique has proved highly successful, helping to solve many challenging problems throughout industry and academia.
The various sub-fields of AI research are centered around particular goals and the use of particular tools. The 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 among the field’s long-term goals. To solve these problems, AI researchers have 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. AI also draws upon computer science, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and many other fields.
Cognitive Modelling Approach
As the name suggests, this approach tries to build an Artificial Intelligence model based on Human Cognition. To distil the essence of the human mind, there are 3 approaches:
- Introspection: Observing our thoughts, and building a model based on that
- Psychological Experiments: Conducting experiments on humans and observing their behaviour
- Brain Imaging: Using MRI to observe how the brain functions in different scenarios and replicating that through code.
The Laws of Thought Approach
The Laws of Thought are a large list of logical statements that govern the operation of our mind. The same laws can be codified and applied to artificial intelligence algorithms. The issues with this approach, because solving a problem in principle (strictly according to the laws of thought) and solving them in practice can be quite different, requiring contextual nuances to apply. Also, there are some actions that we take without being 100% certain of an outcome that an algorithm might not be able to replicate if there are too many parameters.
The Rational Agent Approach
A rational agent acts to achieve the best possible outcome in its present circumstances.
According to the Laws of Thought approach, an entity must behave according to the logical statements. But there are some instances, where there is no logical right thing to do, with multiple outcomes involving different outcomes and corresponding compromises. The rational agent approach tries to make the best possible choice in the current circumstances. It means that it’s a much more dynamic and adaptable agent.
Now that we understand how Artificial Intelligence can be designed to act like a human, let’s take a look at how these systems are built.
Working:
Machine Learning: ML teaches a machine how to make inferences and decisions based on past experience. It identifies patterns, analyses past data to infer the meaning of these data points to reach a possible conclusion without having to involve human experience. This automation to reach conclusions by evaluating data, saves a human time for businesses and helps them make a better decision.
Deep Learning: Deep Learning is an ML technique. It teaches a machine to process inputs through layers in order to classify, infer and predict the outcome.
Neural Networks: Neural Networks work on the similar principles as of Human Neural cells. They are a series of algorithms that captures the relationship between various underlying variables and processes the data as a human brain does.
Natural Language Processing c: NLP is a science of reading, understanding, interpreting a language by a machine. Once a machine understands what the user intends to communicate, it responds accordingly.
Computer Vision: Computer vision algorithms tries to understand an image by breaking down an image and studying different parts of the objects. This helps the machine classify and learn from a set of images, to make a better output decision based on previous observations.
Cognitive Computing: Cognitive computing algorithms try to mimic a human brain by anaysing text/speech/images/objects in a manner that a human does and tries to give the desired output.
Goals of AI
To Create Expert Systems: The systems which exhibit intelligent behavior, learn, demonstrate, explain, and advice its users.
To Implement Human Intelligence in Machines: Creating systems that understand, think, learn, and behave like humans.
Logic, problem-solving: Early researchers developed algorithms that simulate humans’ step-by-step reasoning when solving puzzles or making logical deductions. By the late 1980s and 1990s, AI research had developed methods for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics. For difficult problems, algorithms can require enormous computational resources-most experience a “Combinatorial explosion”: the amount of memory or computer time needed for problems of a certain size becomes astronomical. The search for more efficient problem-solving algorithms is a high priority.
Planning: Intelligent agents must be able to set goals and achieve them. They need a way to envision the future a representation of the state of the world and make predictions about how their actions will change it and be able to make choices that maximize the utility (or “value”) of the options available.
In classical planning problems, the agent can assume that it is the only system acting in the world, allowing the agent to be certain of the consequences of its actions.
However, if the agent is not the only actor, it requires that the agent reason under uncertainty. It calls for an agent to assess its environment, make predictions, evaluate its predictions, and adapt based on its assessment.
Knowledge representation: Knowledge representation and knowledge engineering are central to AI research. Many of the problems that machines are expected to solve will require extensive world knowledge. The things AI needs to represent are objects, properties, categories, and relationships between objects; situations, events, states, and times; Cause and Effect; Knowledge about knowledge (what other people know about what we know); and many other, less well-researched domains.
A representation of “what exists” is an ontology: the set of objects, relations, concepts, and so on about which the machine knows. The most general is upper ontology, which attempts to provide a foundation for all other knowledge.
Creativity: A sub-field of AI addresses creativity theoretically (philosophical, psychological perspective) and practically (the specific implementation of systems that produce novel and useful outputs). Some related areas of computational research include artificial intuition and artificial thinking.
Social Intelligence: Effective computing is the study and development of systems that can detect, interpret, process, and simulate human It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science. While the origins of the field can be traced to early philosophical inquiries into emotion, the more modern branch of computer science originated from Rosalind Picard’s 1995 paper on “effective computing”.
General Intelligence: Many researchers think that their work will eventually result in a machine with artificial general intelligence, combining all the skills described above and exceeding human capacity in most or all of these areas. Some believe that such a project may require anthropomorphic features such as artificial consciousness or an artificial brain.
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