ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

Introduction

The term and concept of Artificial intelligence (AI) was first defined by John McCarthy, an American computer scientist, in 1956 as the “science and engineering of creating intelligent machines.” While there are some tasks that computers are able to perform, they cannot do all, and, most importantly, computers lack the central ability to think and reason. Computer programs may be capable of performing tasks at tremendous speed with huge memory and storage, but their computational capabilities are strictly restricted and limited by the intellectual mechanisms i.e. they can only do what they are programmed to do and cannot think of their own. In fact, computers mainly derive their 'intelligence' from their ability to substitute enormously large amounts of computing (Chilson, 2005, pp. 89-93).

This paper aims at exploring the concept of Artificial Intelligence, while discussing the origins of AI and its different forms. The paper also discusses how AI is being employed in today's technologically advanced world to enable machines perform tasks, which they were not able to do previously.

Basic Architecture of AI Systems

Application software at the base of an AI system is not an immutable set of instructions that represent the solution of a problem, but an 'environment' which represents, uses and modifies a base of knowledge. The system investigates a large number of possible outcomes and dynamically constructs a solution to the problem. Each system of this kind must be able to express two kinds of knowledge in a separate and modular form: a knowledge base and an inference engine. The 'knowledge base' means the 'module' that gathers knowledge about the 'domain', that is the problem. It is possible to extract the details of the knowledge base by dividing it into two sections: a) The block of statements or facts (temporary or short-term memory), b) the blocking of relations and rules (long term memory) (Honiden, et al., 1994, pp. 849-867).

Temporary memory contains the 'declarative knowledge' of a particular challenge. It has a representation that consists of true facts introduced at the start. the rules that belong to long-term memory, are maintained instead that provide a set of recommendations, advice, strategic directives designed to build the wealth of knowledge available to resolve this problem. The rules are made through statements consist of two units. The first is called the 'antecedent' and expresses a situation or a premise, while the second is called the 'consequent' and it starts the action to be applied when there is a finding of truth in the premise. The general syntax is therefore: 'If' before, and the leading 'then' (Kablan, 2009, pp. 222-228).

Each rule collection that represents the domain of knowledge, in order to be valid in a particular instance and these must be compared with a set of facts that represent current knowledge on the current case, and thus satisfied. This is done by executing a matching, in which you try to pull the antecedent of the rule with the various facts present in the cache (Honiden, et ...