14.1 Introduction
From the earliest days of computing, humans have been fascinated by the prospect of constructing intelligent machines. This chapter introduces the field of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that has as its goal the construction of a general-purpose intelligence – of constructing machines that are capable of doing all of the things which, at the present time, people are better. Some of the topics associated with the field of AI include creating machines that can: see and recognize objects in the real world, including people; converse fluently in human languages, such as English, and translate between different human languages; safely drive a car; plan and reason as people do; play strategy games like chess or Go, and knowledge games like Jeopardy!; display creativity and discover new knowledge. Essentially, AI seeks to make computers more like people.
Section 14.2 provides an overview of artificial intelligence including the goals of the field, its underlying assumptions, a brief history of the field, and a summary of progress to date in a number of areas. Section 14.3 describes a variety of topics that have been studied in the effort to achieve intelligent behavior in machines, including: game playing and search, automated reasoning, and neural networks and machine learning. The presentation of these topics is independent from one another, so the instructor and/or student can pick and choose which areas are of interest.
14.2 An overview of artificial intelligence
The goal of artificial intelligence is to construct a general-purpose intelligence – a machine that can interact with a human, more or less, as an equal. What capabilities would a machine have to possess before it could be considered intelligent? Is it possible to construct such a machine? Could we even tell if such machines were truly intelligent?
We begin by describing the capabilities of a fictional intelligent computer, the HAL 9000, in order to examine the features commonly associated with the notion of intelligent machines. We then turn our attention to the question of whether constructing such an intelligent machine is even feasible. Next, the question of how we should go about measuring progress towards achieving artificial intelligence is discussed. The final portions of this section of the chapter focus on an overview of the history of artificial intelligence and some of its accomplishments to date.