The computer scientist John McCarthy was the first man to use the words Artificial Intelligence or AI. He defined it to be "the engineering about making intelligent machines". AI is a wide topic with many fields including psychology, philosophy and of course computer science.
The modern definition is "the study and design of intelligent agents". Intelligent agents have two kind of meanings. In computer science, the meanings is a software agent which will assist users and make own decisions. Software agents are generally pre-programmed to learn and adapt like the programmer chose. A typical example of a software agent is a bot.
In the other meaning, the artificial intelligence way, it's used as an actor which observe and act in a environment. An example of this could be a robot, which tries to interact with its environment and if it's successful it is regarded as intelligent.
An Intelligent agent should, according to Nikola Kasabov, exhibit following:
- Improve through interaction with the environment (embodiment)
- Adapt in real time and online
- Quickly learn from large amounts of data
- Accommodate new problem solving methods incrementally
- Have parameters representing short and long term memory, forgetting, age and other non-perfect human kind problems.
- Analyze itself in terms of errors, behavior and success.
Intelligent machines has been a dream since ancient times and today it is getting closer and closer to reality. The start of the modern AI was when Alan Turing introduces his "Turing test" that was based on a capability to have a human-like conversation with the machine. In 1972 the AI programmers got "their own" programming language called Prolog, developed by Alain Colmerauer.
Twenty-five years later, in 1997, the world really opened its eyes for AI when the IBM Deep Blue chess-playing computer defeated the world champion Garry Kasparov in chess.
Artificial intelligence is now used for many things including pattern recognition, biologically mutations and in military service.
There are plenty of useful tools that has been available through artificial intelligence. One example in game playing could be that the AI agent search through a tree of moves and counter moves to improve its position against the opponent. Other fields where AI methods are implemented are:
- Artificial life
- Automation
- E-mail spam filtering
- Image processing
- Data mining
- Robotics
- Natural language processing (translation, chatter bots)
