Definition: The Field of Artificial Intelligence
By ai-depot | June 30, 2002
Summary
In this essay, we first showed how important the representation is. It is one of the major aspects of Artificial Intelligence, and should not be neglected. There are often many ways of representing a problem, and the most appropriate should be chosen only after carefully considering alternatives. As demonstrated, the change in the representations used over the decades also reflects the state of mind of the researchers, moving from certainty, to uncertainty, then to implicit methods.
We also discussed the approaches of A.I., showing how the field has slowly moved away from the classical approach. The information was modelled perfectly, and the programmer had to define rigid sets of rules and predicates to allow the computer to perform its task. A lot of focus now is placed on statistical approaches, where the computers learn from large amounts of data. Although this requires better designed algorithms, and smarter solutions, this aspect of machine learning provides more flexibility in the solutions and allows the programmer not to have to deal with the tedious part of teaching the computer directly.
The third section listed some of the major fields of Artificial Intelligence, and tried to class them into categories. A fair deal of current research is going into combining all these models in order to tackle larger problems. Ultimate intelligence (whatever that may be ;) is more of a long term objective than anything else, but in the short term many fields of AI are benefiting from using techniques in other fields. Thus, most domain specific applications can be tackled very successfully with such techniques, if a knowledge engineer spends enough time on the problem.
In the preceding page, we considered some of the major applications of AI. This is where much of the money is, and if you’re interested in that sort of thing, that’s where your efforts should go! There are a lot of tools and applications today just crying out for a bit of ‘cleverness’ that AI could provide.
The field Artificial Intelligence is wide, and only a small part of it was mentioned here. Many new branches are been looked into as we speak. They all, however, involve one key factor: getting computers to perform tasks that humans don’t especially want! These algorithms do show some clever abilities (learning, abstraction, generalisation, deliberative planning), but most are restricted to the sand-box they were created in. This is not really what non computer-scientist people expect when they think about artificial intelligence, and much work will have to be done to create entities capable of performing outside of their natal environment.
Written by Alex J. Champandard.
Tags: none
Category: essay |
