Question: What is artificial Intelligence

Andrew French answered on 25 Jun 2014:

Good question 🙂
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is basically the challenge of getting computers to think like, and solve problems like, humans.

One of the first classic AI problems which started in the 1970’s was how to get a computer to win a game of chess. To win chess you need to look ahead a lot of moves, like Grandmasters do – but this is hard as there are so many combinations. People who can play chess have ‘heuristics’ or special rules to help them look ahead faster, looking at only important moves. People also learn ‘set pieces’ – particular things to do in certain situations, like how to start a game. AI approaches to winning chess games take similar approaches – learning a dictionary of set moves, and also searching many moves ahead, trying to find a good move. The searching problem can be done lots of different ways, and the different searching approaches are really where the AI programming comes in. This part has also got easier in recent times as computers are sooo much faster than they were, and so can look ahead lots of moves easily.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess

More interesting AI problems include learning to talk like a human. There is a test called the Turing test. Basically, this says that if you have a text-conversation using some sort of messenger program, if you can’t tell whether you are talking to a computer or a person, then the Turing test has been passed.
You can read more here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
and here is a recent news story http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27762088

I work in a field called image analysis. This can be thought of as teaching computers to understand images, just as our brains ‘understands’ what we see with our eyes. Often, computer vision is thought of as one of the hardest AI problems there is, as so much data (information) is in the image, and getting out a meaningful representation (e.g. there’s a man sitting on a bench, or over there I can see a bird sitting in a tree) is really hard, especially when the computer doesn’t know anything about the world (what a bench looks like, why a bird might sit in a tree…)