Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) comprises a vast interdisciplinary field, which has benefited from its beginning from disciplines such as computer science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, mathematics, engineering, linguistics, economics, education, biology, control theory, and cybernetics. Although the goals of AI are as wide as the field is interdisciplinary, AI's main goal is the design and construction of automated systems (computer programs and machines) that perform tasks considered to require intelligent behavior (i.e., tasks that require adaptation to complex and changing situations).

The role of psychology in AI is twofold. On the one hand, psychologists can help in the development and construction of AI systems because knowledge of cognitive and reasoning processes such as perception, language acquisition, and social interaction is crucial to AI. (Boden, 2009) AI has much to learn from humans because we are the best model of intelligent behavior we know, and because many AI machines will have to interact with us. On the other hand, psychologists could benefit from the AI techniques and tools to develop further their own discipline using AI tools such as modeling and simulation of theories, expert systems in diagnosis and organization, and interactive techniques in education, just to mention a few.

History Of AI

It seems that the desire to build machines that behave intelligently has always been a part of human history. For example, around 2500 BCE in Egypt, citizens and peregrines turned to oracles (statues with priests hidden inside) for advice. Homer's Iliad, a remarkable literature work from ancient Greece, narrates how the Greek god Hephaestos creates Talos, a man of bronze whose duty is to patrol and protect the beaches of Crete. The idea of building humans and machines with intelligence transferred from mythology into modern literature. For example, Karel Kapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which opened in London in 1923, coined the word “robot.” Shortly after, the very popular science fiction movie Metropolis, by Fritz Lang, had a robot character (Maria) that played a decisive role in the plot of the movie. And, in the 1940s, Isaac Asimov started publishing his famous collection of books about robotics.

In modern scientific AI, the first recognized work was Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts's 1943 article A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity, which laid the foundations for the development of neural networks. McCulloch and Pitt proposed a model of artificial neurons, suggesting that any computable function could be achieved by a network of connected neurons and that all logical connectives (and, or, not, etc.) could be implemented by simple network structures. In 1948, Wiener's popular book Cybernetics popularized the term cybernetic and defined the principle of the feedback theory. Wiener suggested that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms, or conditioned responses, and that it was possible to simulate these responses using a computer. (Brooks, 2009)

Knowledge Representation

Knowledge representation addresses the problem of how knowledge about the world can be represented and what kinds of reasoning can be done with that ...