Introduction - Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a big topic. To summarize it in a vague sentence:
Understanding the human intelligence and/or building it.
There are more multiple definitions, that come from a different angle to describe this subject. Stuart Russel and Peter Norvig created a table in there book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. This table gives 8 definitions from 4 different perspectives:
| Thinking Humanly | Thinking Rationally |
|---|---|
| “The exciting new effort to make computers think . . . machines with minds, in the full and literal sense.” (Haugeland, 1985) | “The study of mental faculties through the use of computational models.” (Charniak and McDermott, 1985) |
| “[The automation of] activities that we associate with human thinking, activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning . . .” (Bellman, 1978) | “The study of the computations that make it possible to perceive, reason, and act.” (Winston, 1992) |
| Acting Humanly | Acting Rationally |
| “The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people.” (Kurzweil,1990) | “Computational Intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent agents.” (Poole et al., 1998) |
| “The study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better.” (Rich and Knight, 1991) | “AI . . . is concerned with intelligent behavior in artifacts.” (Nilsson, 1998) |
As seen in this table a big split in AI can be make: thinking and behavior. These two points can be related but doesn’t have to.
The field of AI is split into multiple subfields two subfields are Machine Learning, the learning from example and Deep Learning as a subfield of Machine Learning. These subjects raise in popularity in recent years. Especially the field of Deep Learning increased with the achievement in computer vision.