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Artificial Intelligence

The document discusses artificial intelligence and provides an overview of its history, current applications, and goals and challenges of the field. It covers topics like machine learning, deep learning, knowledge representation, reasoning, planning and decision making.

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Vanathi
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17 views

Artificial Intelligence

The document discusses artificial intelligence and provides an overview of its history, current applications, and goals and challenges of the field. It covers topics like machine learning, deep learning, knowledge representation, reasoning, planning and decision making.

Uploaded by

Vanathi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines,

particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies
methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and uses learning and
intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals.[1] Such machines
may be called AIs.
AI technology is widely used throughout industry, government, and science. Some high-profile
applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search); recommendation
systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix); interacting via human speech (e.g., Google
Assistant, Siri, and Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); generative and creative tools
(e.g., ChatGPT and AI art); and superhuman play and analysis in strategy
games (e.g., chess and Go).[2] However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of
cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once
something becomes useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore."[3][4]
Alan Turing was the first person to conduct substantial research in the field that he called machine
intelligence.[5] Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956.[6] The field went
through multiple cycles of optimism,[7][8] followed by periods of disappointment and loss of funding,
known as AI winter.[9][10] Funding and interest vastly increased after 2012 when deep
learning surpassed all previous AI techniques,[11] and after 2017 with the transformer architecture.
[12]
This led to the AI boom of the early 2020s, with companies, universities, and laboratories
overwhelmingly based in the United States pioneering significant advances in artificial intelligence.[13]
The growing use of artificial intelligence in the 21st century is influencing a societal and economic
shift towards increased automation, data-driven decision-making, and the integration of AI
systems into various economic sectors and areas of life, impacting job markets, healthcare,
government, industry, and education. This raises questions about the long-term effects, ethical
implications, and risks of AI, prompting discussions about regulatory policies to ensure the safety
and benefits of the technology.
The various subfields of AI research are centered around particular goals and the use of particular
tools. The traditional goals of AI research include reasoning, knowledge
representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception, and support for robotics.
[a]
General intelligence—the ability to complete any task performable by a human on an at least equal
level—is among the field's long-term goals.[14]
To reach these goals, AI researchers have adapted and integrated a wide range of techniques,
including search and mathematical optimization, formal logic, artificial neural networks, and methods
based on statistics, operations research, and economics.[b] AI also draws
upon psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, and other fields.[15]

Goals
The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken into subproblems.
These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers expect an intelligent system to
display. The traits described below have received the most attention and cover the scope of AI
research.[a]
Reasoning and problem-solving
Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that humans use when
they solve puzzles or make logical deductions.[16] By the late 1980s and 1990s, methods were
developed for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts
from probability and economics.[17]
Many of these algorithms are insufficient for solving large reasoning problems because they
experience a "combinatorial explosion": They become exponentially slower as the problems grow.
Even humans rarely use the step-by-step deduction that early AI research could model. They
[18]

solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive judgments.[19] Accurate and efficient reasoning is an
unsolved problem.
Knowledge representation

An ontology represents knowledge as a set of concepts


within a domain and the relationships between those concepts.
Knowledge representation and knowledge engineering[20] allow AI programs to answer questions
intelligently and make deductions about real-world facts. Formal knowledge representations are
used in content-based indexing and retrieval,[21] scene interpretation,[22] clinical decision support,
[23]
knowledge discovery (mining "interesting" and actionable inferences from large databases),[24] and
other areas.[25]
A knowledge base is a body of knowledge represented in a form that can be used by a program.
An ontology is the set of objects, relations, concepts, and properties used by a particular domain of
knowledge.[26] Knowledge bases need to represent things such as objects, properties, categories,
and relations between objects;[27] situations, events, states, and time;[28] causes and effects;
[29]
knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what other people know);[30] default
reasoning (things that humans assume are true until they are told differently and will remain true
even when other facts are changing);[31] and many other aspects and domains of knowledge.
Among the most difficult problems in knowledge representation are the breadth of commonsense
knowledge (the set of atomic facts that the average person knows is enormous);[32] and the sub-
symbolic form of most commonsense knowledge (much of what people know is not represented as
"facts" or "statements" that they could express verbally).[19] There is also the difficulty of knowledge
acquisition, the problem of obtaining knowledge for AI applications.[c]
Planning and decision-making
An "agent" is anything that perceives and takes actions in the world. A rational agent has goals or
preferences and takes actions to make them happen.[d][35] In automated planning, the agent has a
specific goal.[36] In automated decision-making, the agent has preferences—there are some
situations it would prefer to be in, and some situations it is trying to avoid. The decision-making
agent assigns a number to each situation (called the "utility") that measures how much the agent
prefers it. For each possible action, it can calculate the "expected utility": the utility of all possible
outcomes of the action, weighted by the probability that the outcome will occur. It can then choose
the action with the maximum expected utility.[37]
In classical planning, the agent knows exactly what the effect of any action will be.[38] In most real-
world problems, however, the agent may not be certain about the situation they are in (it is
"unknown" or "unobservable") and it may not know for certain what will happen after each possible
action (it is not "deterministic"). It must choose an action by making a probabilistic guess and then
reassess the situation to see if the action worked.[39]
In some problems, the agent's preferences may be uncertain, especially if there are other agents or
humans involved. These can be learned (e.g., with inverse reinforcement learning), or the agent can
seek information to improve its preferences.[40] Information value theory can be used to weigh the
value of exploratory or experimental actions.[41] The space of possible future actions and situations is
typically intractably large, so the agents must take actions and evaluate situations while being
uncertain of what the outcome will be.
A Markov decision process has a transition model that describes the probability that a particular
action will change the state in a particular way and a reward function that supplies the utility of each
state and the cost of each action. A policy associates a decision with each possible state. The policy
could be calculated (e.g., by iteration), be heuristic, or it can be learned.[42]
Game theory describes the rational behavior of multiple interacting agents and is used in AI
programs that make decisions that involve other agents.

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