Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the ability of a computer program or a machine to think and learn. It is also a field of study which tries to make computers «smart». John McCarthy came up with the name «Artificial Intelligence» in 1955. In general use, the term «Artificial intelligence» means a program that mimics human cognition.

At least some of the things we associate with other minds, such as learning and problem solving can be done by computers, though not in the same way as we do. As machines become increasingly capable, mental faculties once thought to require intelligence are removed from the definition. At present we use the term AI for successfully understanding human speech, competing at a high level in strategic game systems, self-driving cars, and interpreting complex data. An extreme goal of AI research is to create computer programs that can learn, solve problems, and think logically.

In practice, however, most applications have picked on problems that computers can do well. Searching databases and doing calculations are things computers do better than people. AI involves many different fields like computer science, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Eventually, researchers hope to create a «general artificial intelligence» which can solve many problems instead of focusing on just one.

Analytical AI has only characteristics consistent with cognitive intelligence generating the cognitive representation of the world and using learning based on past experience to inform future decisions. Human-inspired AI has elements from cognitive as well as emotional intelligence, understanding, in addition to cognitive elements, also human emotions considering them in their decision making.

HISTORY

The first appearance of artificial intelligence is in Greek myths, like TALOS of Crete or the bronze robot of Hephaestus. Humanoid robots were built by Yan Shi, Hero of Alexandria, and Al-Jazari. Sentient machines became popular in fiction during the 19th and 20th centuries with the stories of Frankenstein and Rossum's Universal Robots.

Formal logic was developed by ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians. This study of logic produced the idea of a computer in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was a month-long brainstorming session attended by many people with interests in AI. At the conference they wrote programs that were amazing at the time, beating people at checkers or solving word problems. The Department of Defense started giving a lot of money to AI research and labs were created all over the world.

Unfortunately, researchers really underestimated just how hard some problems were. The tools they had used still did not give computers things like emotions or common sense. AI research revived in The 1980s because of the popularity of expert systems, which simulated the knowledge of a human expert. By 1985, 1 billion dollars were spent on AI. New, faster computers convinced U.S. and British governments to start funding AI research again. However, the market for Lisp machines collapsed in 1987, and funding was pulled again, starting an even longer AI winter. 

AI revived again in the 90s and early 2000s with its use in data mining and medical diagnosis. This was possible because of faster computers and focusing on solving more specific problems.

 Source: Wikipedia