What is Artificial
Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is wide-ranging branch of computer
science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks
that typically require human intelligence. AI is an interdisciplinary
science with multiple approaches, but advancements in machine learning and
deep learning are creating a paradigm shift in virtually every sector of
the tech industry.
HOW
DOES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WORK?
Can
machines think?
Less than a decade after breaking the Nazi
encryption machine Enigma and helping the Allied Forces win World War II,
mathematician Alan Turing changed history a second time with a simple question:
"Can machines think?"
Turing's paper "Computing
Machinery and Intelligence" (1950), and it's subsequent Turing
Test, established the fundamental goal and vision of artificial
intelligence.
At it's core, AI is the branch of computer
science that aims to answer Turing's question in the affirmative. It is the
endeavor to replicate or simulate human intelligence in machines.
The expansive goal of
artificial intelligence has given rise to many questions and debates. So
much so, that no singular definition of the field is universally accepted.
The major limitation
in defining AI as simply "building machines that are intelligent" is
that it doesn't actually explain what artificial intelligence is? What
makes a machine intelligent?
In their
groundbreaking textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,
authors Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig approach the question by unifying their
work around the theme of intelligent agents in machines. With this in mind, AI
is "the study of agents that receive percepts from the environment and
perform actions." (Russel and Norvig viii)
Norvig and Russell go
on to explore four different approaches that have historically defined the
field of AI:
1. Thinking humanly
2. Thinking rationally
3. Acting humanly
4. Acting rationally
The first two ideas
concern thought processes and reasoning, while the others deal with behavior.
Norvig and Russell focus particularly on rational agents that act to achieve
the best outcome, noting "all the skills needed for the Turing Test also
allow an agent to act rationally."
Patrick Winston, the
Ford professor of artificial intelligence and computer science at MIT, defines AI as "algorithms enabled by
constraints, exposed by representations that support models targeted at loops
that tie thinking, perception and action together."
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While these
definitions may seem abstract to the average person, they help focus the field
as an area of computer science and provide a blueprint for infusing machines
and programs with machine learning and other subsets of artificial
intelligence.
While addressing a
crowd at the Japan AI Experience in 2017, DataRobot CEO Jeremy Achin
began his speech by offering the following definition of how AI is used today:
"AI is a computer
system able to perform tasks that ordinarily require human intelligence... Many
of these artificial intelligence systems are powered by machine learning, some
of them are powered by deep learning and some of them are powered by very
boring things like rules."
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