What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the area of computer science that deals with the creation of intelligent machines based on computer programmes to make them work and react like humans.

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the area of computer science that deals with the creation of intelligent machines based on computer programmes to make them work and react like humans. Artificial intelligence has become an important part of the technology industry. It requires highly technical and specialized research involving programming computers for certain traits including;

• Perception
• Reasoning
• Learning
• Knowledge
• Planning

Science fiction often equates artificial intelligence to robots with human-like characteristics. However, artificial intelligence is wide and encompasses a lot; from Google’s search algorithms, IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons.

Today, artificial intelligence is properly known as narrow/weak AI because it is designed to perform narrow tasks such as facial recognition only, the internet searches only or even simply driving a car only. Many artificial intelligence researchers have a long-term goal of coming up with a general artificial intelligence system that can perform multiple functions. Narrow artificial intelligent systems only outperform humans in their specific areas. On the contrary, general artificial intelligent systems are expected to outperform humans at nearly all cognitive tasks.

Branches of artificial intelligence

a) Logical Artificial Intelligence

Logical artificial intelligence holds that a programme decides what to do by inferring the actions appropriate in achieving a particular goal. The programme makes use of what it already knows about the world in general and the specific facts of the situation at hand. Its goals are represented by sentences of mathematical logical language.

b) Pattern Recognition

in order to make any observation, a programme is set so that it can compare what it sees with a particular pattern. A vision programme may, for example, try to match the pattern of nose and eyes in a scene to find the face. There are more complex patterns such as natural language recognition.

c) Inference

A programme is able to infer something from a set of facts. Monotonic inference makes use of mathematical logical deductions while non-monotonic deductions apply more than simple mathematical deductions so that a logical conclusion can be withdrawn if there is evidence contradicting it. A good illustration is that when you hear of a bird, you infer that it can fly, but once you learn that it is a penguin, you withdraw the conclusion since penguins do not fly.

d) Other branches of Artificial intelligence

• Representation
• Search
• Common sense knowledge and reasoning
• Planning
• Learning from experience
• Epistemology
• Ontology
• Heuristics
• Genetic programming

Application of artificial intelligence

There are numerous applications of artificial intelligence, the most notable of them include;

• Speech recognition
• Game playing
• Understanding natural language
• Computer vision
• Heuristic classification
• Expert systems

The advancement in the field of artificial intelligence has greatly contributed to the development of the robotics industry. Artificial intelligent enabled-robots can handle such tasks as navigation and object manipulation together with sub-problems of motion planning, localization, and mapping.

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