Definition: The Field of Artificial Intelligence
By ai-depot | June 30, 2002
Applications
The applications of A.I. are the driving force behind the research. There are many practical uses for such systems, and it is big business. You can expect a few million dollars/pounds income if you come up with something clever and create a nice product based on it. Funding is, therefore, less of a problem when the potential of the application is obvious.
Pattern Recognition
Pattern recognition involves determining the characteristics in specific samples and sorting them into classes; a process called classification. This is usually done with Machine Learning techniques, allowing the system to adapt to the data given to it. It can be applied to detecting single words in speech, recognising voices, sorting scanned objects by type and filtering out unwanted pictures (among many others).
In practice, a way of doing this is to represent the sample as a set of features (e.g. for a sound: pitch, volume, timbre, smoothness). A training set is then created: i.e. a set of samples where the result is known (e.g. for facial recognition: Fred has green eyes and brown hair, Henry has blue eyes and blond hair). The learning mechanism can then learn to associate the features with the known types of sound or image. Depending on the representation, more or less samples are required. With symbolic representations, small numbers of examples are usually required, whereas for fuzzy learning (in neural networks for example) larger training sets are needed.
Robotics
The main aspect of robotics today is mobility. For example how can a mechanical device be controlled to move its body parts in a planned fashion, or navigate around a room? This can be done by learning the task in a virtual simulation, and then applying it to the real robot. If specific conditions of training are respected, the problem has a high probability of working in real life, but this is no guarantee.
In practice when moving robotic arms, the arm has a few movement possibilities: the shoulder allows rotations according to two axis, and the elbow also allow two basic rotations. Each of these possibilities is called one degree of freedom. Usually, one controller is assigned to provide movement for one DOF. The task at hand is to learn the optimal combination of controllers, where they can successfully cooperate to perform a given task.
Natural Language Processing
This is the task of extracting meaning from text, also known as computational linguistics. Once this meaning is processed, it can also potentially be interpreted and understood, or at least the basics!
One of the first approach was symbolic, assigning semantic meaning to each word (verb, noun, adjective). The basic structure of valid sentences would have to be defined manually, and a search would be performed to match the template with the current sentence. A lot of time needed to be spent resolving ambiguous sentences, and getting the person and tenses of the verbs to match. If the programmer spends enough time creating the sentence templates, the results would be fairly encouraging. But this monotonous task needs to be repeated for new sentence constructs and new languages all together.
A very recent approach is to use statistical analysis of the text. In essence, large parts of books are processed and learning algorithms attempt to extract the rules and patterns. This requires a smarter approach, taking more time to design, but it results in a more flexible program.
Artificial Life
This is a very popular aspect of Artificial Intelligence, which involves modelling and mimicking living systems. This includes ant hills, wasp nests, larger forests, towns and cities. To date, very complex and interesting systems have been created by a multitude of very simple entities. For example many ants programmed by very small programs would potentially create an entire system with signs of emergent intelligence.
We have yet to define systems that are based on complex individuals, capable of learning. This is a task that has captured the mind of many researchers and dreamers alike.
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