Artificial Intelligence

Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the study of how to build intelligent systems. Specifically, AI is concerned with developing computer programs with intelligent behaviors, such as problem solving, reasoning, and learning.

Since the name artificial intelligence was coined in 1956, AI has been through cycles of ups and downs. From the beginning, game playing has been an important AI research subject for problem solving. Expert systems have been successfully developed to achieve expert-level performance in real-world applications by capturing domain-specific knowledge from human experts in knowledge bases for machine reasoning, and they have been used widely in science, medicine, business, and education (Alonso, 25).

Discussion

Machine learning arose as an important research subject in AI, enabling dynamic intelligent systems with learning ability to be built. Patterned after biological evolution, genetic algorithm spawns the population of competing candidate solutions and drives them to evolve ever better solutions (Bainbridge, 407).

Theoretical and practical advance in artificial intelligence depends on the development of increasingly powerful languages in which to write programs or (what comes to the same thing) in which to communicate with the machine.

Agent-based models demonstrate that globally intelligent behavior can arise from the interaction of relatively simple structures. Based on the interaction between individual agents, intelligence is seen as emerging from society and not just as a property of an individual agent (Bainbridge, 408). Recently, AI has been moving toward building intelligent agents in real environments, such as Internet auctions. Multiagent systems, as the platform for the convergence of various AI technologies, benefit from the abstractions of human society in an environment that contains multiple agents with different capabilities, goals, and beliefs (Conte, 16).

AI researchers have attempted to bridge the computer intelligence gap by developing new technologies such as “neural nets.” NASA is working on developing “fuzzy logic” and “neural net” technology for ...