Gentle Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

A Gentle Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
By Kannan Balakrishnan

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science, which tries to give "intelligence to machines". But the concept of intelligence itself is debatable, and making these machines without life "intelligent" is something near to impossible. But we can say safely that AI aims at producing intelligent behavior from machines. What is the difference between having intelligence and having intelligent behavior? You can exhibit intelligent behavior in a narrow field for some time without really being intelligent. For example a computer playing chess at the master level does not even know that it is playing chess. But for the outsider the view is that it is intelligent like a master. Also we need only this intelligent behavior for many practical purposes.

AI uses ideas from diverse branches of knowledge like computer science, economics, biology, social sciences, mathematics and even grammar. It has also diverse applications in many areas of life. That is, it is an interdisciplinary subject, which takes ideas from almost all fields of knowledge and has applications in many diverse areas of life. Some of the branches of AI are discussed below. This in no way is a complete list.

1. Game playing:
Playing a game like checkers, chess, or go, requires a lot of intelligence for a human being and so these tasks were one of the earliest attractions of AI. Samuel wrote a program playing checkers in the 60's and many people contributed to the theory of game playing. Finally when a computer could beat the then world champion in a chess game, that was considered a victory of machine over man even though it was not so. Currently there are well-known algorithms for game playing and game playing is considered falling into the domain of algorithms than AI.