Definition: The Field of Artificial Intelligence
By ai-depot | June 30, 2002
Approaches
Classical
The classical approach to A.I. is deductive. Given a set of base rules, deduce what combination produces the desired result. In practice, this is usually done by a search of the possible combinations. A particular kind of search called depth-first search, involves a minimal use of the memory. This was one of the initial motivations for such an approach.
Typically, a symbolic representation is used in this case. As such the popular languages for such an approach are LISP and Prolog. The search mechanism is directly built into the core of Prolog. With a bit more hassle, the good old “C” can also be used to implement these searches, and is often used in logic games such as chess.
A major problem with this approach resides in the initial creation of the rules. This can be extremely tedious and time consuming, and many cases need to be taken into account explicitly. Special care is also needed to assure that the search is possible, and can be accomplished in a finite amount of time.
Statistical
The statistical approach to A.I. is based on inductive reasoning. Given a large set of data for the problem, we try an extract patterns from it, and induce the trend. This has become possible thanks to machine learning, which allows these patterns to be abstracted and generalised.
Generally, a fuzzy representation is used to express the rules extracted from the data. This is more practical since the large data sets may often have noise, and exact data would be impossible to determine. Probabilities allow this uncertainty to be expressed.
This approach is more intense on the memory than the previous approach, since the large set of data needs to be accessed in an efficient fashion, requiring it to be in memory. Efficient, lower level languages are therefore preferred, such as C and possibly even C++.
Theoretical
Many leading researchers have done a fair amount of theoretical research. This usually involves the philosophical aspect of A.I. Numerous books have been published on the theory of life, emotions, emergent systems (rule based groups of agents with a seemingly intelligent behaviour). This type of work is difficult to experiment with, but key concepts can thereby be picked out and researched further in isolation.
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