ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) was first defined by the American computer scientist John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, as the “science and engineering of creating intelligent machines.” This definition, in its essence, has held, despite considerable shifts in technological paradigms, from the earlier emphasis on creation of intelligent computer programs to the current stress on convergence technologies. However, in the absence of an absolute definition of intelligence, only degrees of intelligence can be defined, with human intelligence being the benchmark to which other intelligences compared. In addition, there is also a lack of consensuses on the computational procedures that can be termed intelligent.

While computers can carry out some tasks, they cannot carry out all, and they lack the crucial ability to reason. Computer programs may have tremendous amounts of speed and memory, but their capabilities got circumscribed by the intellectual mechanisms that have been built into the programs. In fact, the ability to substitute large amounts of computing in lieu of understanding is what gives computers their seeming “intelligence”. Thus, for example, the chess player program Deep Blue substitutes millions of computations of possible moves in the place of reason and intuition (Alpaydin, 2004).

Thesis Statement:

Technological advances have undoubtedly been more rapid in the last sixty years than in all human development, but artificial intelligence is developing so fast that some wonder if it will not end up surpassing human intelligence. Therefore, it would be the theoretical end of the domination of mankind.

Discussion and Analysis

Barriers to Artificial Intelligence:

The key barrier to the creation of AI remains the failure to duplicate the nebulous quality of human intelligence that has been defined as the computational fraction of the capability to attain objectives in the world. With the inability, of programs to replicate the essential features of human nature, such as common sense or intuition—attempts to create AI generally fail under the heavy load of rules that had to be written to deal with every problem. A few experts believe that human level intelligence can be attained through gathering data in computers, but the general consensus is that without a fundamental transformation, it cannot be predicted when human level intelligence will be achieved (Turing, 1950).

Branches of Artificial Intelligence:

There are many extant branches of AI including logical AI—where a program tallies what it knows regarding the world in general with the facts of the specific situation on which it must act, with goals represented by sentences of some mathematical logical language; search programs that scrutinize a large number of possibilities, such as moves in a chess game; pattern recognition programs that compare what gets perceived with a databank of stored images.

Generally, the complex the pattern, for example, a natural-language text or a chess position, the more complex the program; representative AI that denotes facts using languages of mathematical logic, inference machines, where facts get derived from other known facts, commonsense AI, which, in an indications of the difficulties in creating AI, is the least developed in spite of enormous research, except ...