Artificial Intelligence Overview

Can machines think? In 1950, Alan Turing published "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and he asked the question "Can machines think?". Instead of answering this question directly, Alan Turing proposed an alternate question "Can a machine behave intelligently so that a human interrogator can not tell whether it is a human or a machine?".

In 1955, John McCarthy together with Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon coined the term "artificial intelligence", and organized the famous Dartmouth Conference in Summer 1956.

Around 2010, with the availability of big data, dramatically improved machine learning approaches and algorithms, and more advanced computing power, the industry has been increasing much investment in AI and many AI applications become production in this decade.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

The machine is considered to have AI, when it can

• think humanly: the cognitive modeling approach
• think rationally: the "laws of thought" approach
• acting humanly: the Turing Test approach
• acting rationally: the rational agent approach

In Wikipedia, Artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals. In computer science AI research is defined as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving". Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

Types of AI

We can categorize AI into 2 types: weak AI and strong AI.

Weak AI (also known as narrow AI): an AI system is designed and trained for particular tasks
Strong AI (also known as artificial general intelligence): an AI system with generalized human cognitive abilities so that it has enough intelligence to find a solution and perform unfamiliar task.