Artifitial Intelligence: Chapter 1 Introduction

What is AI?

1. Modeling human cognition or mental faculty using computers
2. Study of making computers do things which at the moment people better
3. Making computers do things which require intelligence

Intelligence is a property of mind that encompasses many related mental abilities, such as the capacities to

• reason
• plan
  
• solve problems
• think abstractly,
• comprehend ideas and language, and
• learn

More formally AI is a branch of computer science which is concerned with the study and creation of computer systems that exhibit

• some form of intelligence or
• the characteristics we associate with intelligence in human behavior
  

Two Views of AI Goals

• AI is about duplicating what the (human) brain DOES
• Cognitive Science
• AI is about duplicating what the (human) brain SHOULD do
• Rationality (doing things logically)

Cool Stuff in AI

1. Game playing agents
2. Machine learning
3. Speech
4. Language
5. Vision
6. Data Mining
7. Web agents

Useful Stuff

1. Medical Diagnosis
2. Fraud Detection
3. Object Identification
4. Space Shuttle Scheduling
5. Information Retrieval

What is AI today?
Three typical components of AI Systems

THE WORLD ----->Perception-----> Action------> Reasoning------>THE WORLD

Recent AI: Heavy use of

• probability theory
• decision theory
• statistics
• logic (fuzzy, modal, temporal)