Artificial intelligence is a big trend and popular field in research and industry in recent decades. It can change jobs, lifestyle and future of human. News of AI is heard every day and make it a well-known phrase for all people. The term “Artificial intelligence” was coined by John McCarthy in 1956, but attempting to make machines which imitate human behavior began many years ago. McCarthy defined AI as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." Following are some of the popular definition of AI:
- Intelligence measures an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments (Legg, S. and Hutter, M.).
- The essence of intelligence is the principle of adapting to the environment while working with insufficient knowledge and resources. Accordingly, an intelligent system should rely on finite processing capacity, work in real time, open to unexpected tasks, and learn from experience. This working definition interprets "intelligence" as a form of "relative rationality" (Wang, P.).
- The designing and building of intelligent agents that receive percepts from the environment and take actions that affect that environment (Russell, S. J. and Norvig, P.).
- The capability of computer systems to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence (e.g., perception, conversation, decision-making) (United States Defense Science Board (DSB)).
Categorization of Artificial Intelligence:
Narrow AI (Weak AI): producing applications to do a single intelligent behavior. Based on Techopedia definition:”Narrow artificial intelligence (narrow AI) is a specific type of artificial intelligence in which a technology outperforms humans in some very narrowly defined task”. Spam filters in email services and picture recognition tools are examples of narrow AI applications.
Artificial General Intelligence (Strong AI): producing machines with human level intelligence. AGI focuses on creating agents which can do intelligent behavior in new environments. These agents can learn automatically and solve unpredicted problems.
Generally, artificial intelligence is an umbrella term that encompasses many fields.
- Machine Learning: Creating systems with ability to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed
- Natural language Processing: Creating systems with ability to understand, interpret and manipulate human language.
- Robotic: Creating systems to perform some tasks instead of human. (This field is an interdisciplinary branch and includes some fields like Mechanical engineering and electrical engineering).
- Planning: Creating systems to choose a sequence of actions with a high likelihood to complete the specific task.
- Vision: Creating systems with ability to see and analyze visual information.
- Expert Systems: Creating systems with ability to solving problems that require a human expert (these systems preserve human expert's knowledge in their knowledge base).