Archive for the ‘Artificial Intelligence’ Category

Artificial intelligence – Wikipedia

Intelligence demonstrated by machines

In computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans. Leading AI textbooks define the field as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.[1] Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is often used to describe machines (or computers) that mimic "cognitive" functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem solving".

As machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered to require "intelligence" are often removed from the definition of AI, a phenomenon known as the AI effect.[3] A quip in Tesler's Theorem says "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."[4] For instance, optical character recognition is frequently excluded from things considered to be AI[5] , having become a routine technology.[6] Modern machine capabilities generally classified as AI include successfully understanding human speech, competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go),[8] autonomously operating cars, intelligent routing in content delivery networks, and military simulations.

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1955, and in the years since has experienced several waves of optimism,[9][10] followed by disappointment and the loss of funding (known as an "AI winter"),[11][12] followed by new approaches, success and renewed funding.[10][13] For most of its history, AI research has been divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other.[14] These sub-fields are based on technical considerations, such as particular goals (e.g. "robotics" or "machine learning"),[15] the use of particular tools ("logic" or artificial neural networks), or deep philosophical differences.[16][17][18] Subfields have also been based on social factors (particular institutions or the work of particular researchers).[14]

The traditional problems (or goals) of AI research include reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception and the ability to move and manipulate objects.[15] General intelligence is among the field's long-term goals.[19] Approaches include statistical methods, computational intelligence, and traditional symbolic AI. Many tools are used in AI, including versions of search and mathematical optimization, artificial neural networks, and methods based on statistics, probability and economics. The AI field draws upon computer science, information engineering, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and many other fields.

The field was founded on the assumption that human intelligence "can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it".[20] This raises philosophical arguments about the nature of the mind and the ethics of creating artificial beings endowed with human-like intelligence. These issues have been explored by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity.[21] Some people also consider AI to be a danger to humanity if it progresses unabated.[22][23] Others believe that AI, unlike previous technological revolutions, will create a risk of mass unemployment.[24]

In the twenty-first century, AI techniques have experienced a resurgence following concurrent advances in computer power, large amounts of data, and theoretical understanding; and AI techniques have become an essential part of the technology industry, helping to solve many challenging problems in computer science, software engineering and operations research.[25][13]

Thought-capable artificial beings appeared as storytelling devices in antiquity,[26] and have been common in fiction, as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Karel apek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).[27] These characters and their fates raised many of the same issues now discussed in the ethics of artificial intelligence.[21]

The study of mechanical or "formal" reasoning began with philosophers and mathematicians in antiquity. The study of mathematical logic led directly to Alan Turing's theory of computation, which suggested that a machine, by shuffling symbols as simple as "0" and "1", could simulate any conceivable act of mathematical deduction. This insight, that digital computers can simulate any process of formal reasoning, is known as the ChurchTuring thesis.[28] Along with concurrent discoveries in neurobiology, information theory and cybernetics, this led researchers to consider the possibility of building an electronic brain. Turing proposed changing the question from whether a machine was intelligent, to "whether or not it is possible for machinery to show intelligent behaviour".[29] The first work that is now generally recognized as AI was McCullouch and Pitts' 1943 formal design for Turing-complete "artificial neurons".

The field of AI research was born at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956,[31] where the term "Artificial Intelligence" was coined by John McCarthy to distinguish the field from cybernetics and escape the influence of the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener.[32] Attendees Allen Newell (CMU), Herbert Simon (CMU), John McCarthy (MIT), Marvin Minsky (MIT) and Arthur Samuel (IBM) became the founders and leaders of AI research.[33] They and their students produced programs that the press described as "astonishing": computers were learning checkers strategies (c. 1954)[35] (and by 1959 were reportedly playing better than the average human),[36] solving word problems in algebra, proving logical theorems (Logic Theorist, first run c. 1956) and speaking English.[37] By the middle of the 1960s, research in the U.S. was heavily funded by the Department of Defense[38] and laboratories had been established around the world.[39] AI's founders were optimistic about the future: Herbert Simon predicted, "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do". Marvin Minsky agreed, writing, "within a generation... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved".[9]

They failed to recognize the difficulty of some of the remaining tasks. Progress slowed and in 1974, in response to the criticism of Sir James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from the US Congress to fund more productive projects, both the U.S. and British governments cut off exploratory research in AI. The next few years would later be called an "AI winter",[11] a period when obtaining funding for AI projects was difficult.

In the early 1980s, AI research was revived by the commercial success of expert systems,[41] a form of AI program that simulated the knowledge and analytical skills of human experts. By 1985, the market for AI had reached over a billion dollars. At the same time, Japan's fifth generation computer project inspired the U.S and British governments to restore funding for academic research.[10] However, beginning with the collapse of the Lisp Machine market in 1987, AI once again fell into disrepute, and a second, longer-lasting hiatus began.[12]

The development of metaloxidesemiconductor (MOS) very-large-scale integration (VLSI), in the form of complementary MOS (CMOS) transistor technology, enabled the development of practical artificial neural network (ANN) technology in the 1980s. A landmark publication in the field was the 1989 book Analog VLSI Implementation of Neural Systems by Carver A. Mead and Mohammed Ismail.[42]

In the late 1990s and early 21st century, AI began to be used for logistics, data mining, medical diagnosis and other areas.[25] The success was due to increasing computational power (see Moore's law and transistor count), greater emphasis on solving specific problems, new ties between AI and other fields (such as statistics, economics and mathematics), and a commitment by researchers to mathematical methods and scientific standards.[43] Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing system to beat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, on 11 May 1997.

In 2011, a Jeopardy! quiz show exhibition match, IBM's question answering system, Watson, defeated the two greatest Jeopardy! champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, by a significant margin. Faster computers, algorithmic improvements, and access to large amounts of data enabled advances in machine learning and perception; data-hungry deep learning methods started to dominate accuracy benchmarks around 2012.[46] The Kinect, which provides a 3D bodymotion interface for the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One, uses algorithms that emerged from lengthy AI research[47] as do intelligent personal assistants in smartphones.[48] In March 2016, AlphaGo won 4 out of 5 games of Go in a match with Go champion Lee Sedol, becoming the first computer Go-playing system to beat a professional Go player without handicaps.[8][49] In the 2017 Future of Go Summit, AlphaGo won a three-game match with Ke Jie,[50] who at the time continuously held the world No. 1 ranking for two years.[51][52] This marked the completion of a significant milestone in the development of Artificial Intelligence as Go is a relatively complex game, more so than Chess.

According to Bloomberg's Jack Clark, 2015 was a landmark year for artificial intelligence, with the number of software projects that use AI Google increased from a "sporadic usage" in 2012 to more than 2,700 projects. Clark also presents factual data indicating the improvements of AI since 2012 supported by lower error rates in image processing tasks.[53] He attributes this to an increase in affordable neural networks, due to a rise in cloud computing infrastructure and to an increase in research tools and datasets.[13] Other cited examples include Microsoft's development of a Skype system that can automatically translate from one language to another and Facebook's system that can describe images to blind people.[53] In a 2017 survey, one in five companies reported they had "incorporated AI in some offerings or processes".[54][55] Around 2016, China greatly accelerated its government funding; given its large supply of data and its rapidly increasing research output, some observers believe it may be on track to becoming an "AI superpower".[56][57] However, it has been acknowledged that reports regarding artificial intelligence have tended to be exaggerated.[58][59][60]

Computer science defines AI research as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.[1] A more elaborate definition characterizes AI as a systems ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation.[61]

A typical AI analyzes its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success.[1] An AI's intended utility function (or goal) can be simple ("1 if the AI wins a game of Go, 0 otherwise") or complex ("Do mathematically similar actions to the ones succeeded in the past"). Goals can be explicitly defined or induced. If the AI is programmed for "reinforcement learning", goals can be implicitly induced by rewarding some types of behavior or punishing others.[a] Alternatively, an evolutionary system can induce goals by using a "fitness function" to mutate and preferentially replicate high-scoring AI systems, similar to how animals evolved to innately desire certain goals such as finding food. Some AI systems, such as nearest-neighbor, instead of reason by analogy, these systems are not generally given goals, except to the degree that goals are implicit in their training data. Such systems can still be benchmarked if the non-goal system is framed as a system whose "goal" is to successfully accomplish its narrow classification task.[64]

AI often revolves around the use of algorithms. An algorithm is a set of unambiguous instructions that a mechanical computer can execute.[b] A complex algorithm is often built on top of other, simpler, algorithms. A simple example of an algorithm is the following (optimal for first player) recipe for play at tic-tac-toe:

Many AI algorithms are capable of learning from data; they can enhance themselves by learning new heuristics (strategies, or "rules of thumb", that have worked well in the past), or can themselves write other algorithms. Some of the "learners" described below, including Bayesian networks, decision trees, and nearest-neighbor, could theoretically, (given infinite data, time, and memory) learn to approximate any function, including which combination of mathematical functions would best describe the world[citation needed]. These learners could therefore, derive all possible knowledge, by considering every possible hypothesis and matching them against the data. In practice, it is almost never possible to consider every possibility, because of the phenomenon of "combinatorial explosion", where the amount of time needed to solve a problem grows exponentially. Much of AI research involves figuring out how to identify and avoid considering broad range of possibilities that are unlikely to be beneficial.[66] For example, when viewing a map and looking for the shortest driving route from Denver to New York in the East, one can in most cases skip looking at any path through San Francisco or other areas far to the West; thus, an AI wielding a pathfinding algorithm like A* can avoid the combinatorial explosion that would ensue if every possible route had to be ponderously considered in turn.[68]

The earliest (and easiest to understand) approach to AI was symbolism (such as formal logic): "If an otherwise healthy adult has a fever, then they may have influenza". A second, more general, approach is Bayesian inference: "If the current patient has a fever, adjust the probability they have influenza in such-and-such way". The third major approach, extremely popular in routine business AI applications, are analogizers such as SVM and nearest-neighbor: "After examining the records of known past patients whose temperature, symptoms, age, and other factors mostly match the current patient, X% of those patients turned out to have influenza". A fourth approach is harder to intuitively understand, but is inspired by how the brain's machinery works: the artificial neural network approach uses artificial "neurons" that can learn by comparing itself to the desired output and altering the strengths of the connections between its internal neurons to "reinforce" connections that seemed to be useful. These four main approaches can overlap with each other and with evolutionary systems; for example, neural nets can learn to make inferences, to generalize, and to make analogies. Some systems implicitly or explicitly use multiple of these approaches, alongside many other AI and non-AI algorithms; the best approach is often different depending on the problem.[70]

Learning algorithms work on the basis that strategies, algorithms, and inferences that worked well in the past are likely to continue working well in the future. These inferences can be obvious, such as "since the sun rose every morning for the last 10,000 days, it will probably rise tomorrow morning as well". They can be nuanced, such as "X% of families have geographically separate species with color variants, so there is a Y% chance that undiscovered black swans exist". Learners also work on the basis of "Occam's razor": The simplest theory that explains the data is the likeliest. Therefore, according to Occam's razor principle, a learner must be designed such that it prefers simpler theories to complex theories, except in cases where the complex theory is proven substantially better.

Settling on a bad, overly complex theory gerrymandered to fit all the past training data is known as overfitting. Many systems attempt to reduce overfitting by rewarding a theory in accordance with how well it fits the data, but penalizing the theory in accordance with how complex the theory is. Besides classic overfitting, learners can also disappoint by "learning the wrong lesson". A toy example is that an image classifier trained only on pictures of brown horses and black cats might conclude that all brown patches are likely to be horses. A real-world example is that, unlike humans, current image classifiers don't determine the spatial relationship between components of the picture; instead, they learn abstract patterns of pixels that humans are oblivious to, but that linearly correlate with images of certain types of real objects. Faintly superimposing such a pattern on a legitimate image results in an "adversarial" image that the system misclassifies.[c][73][74][75]

Compared with humans, existing AI lacks several features of human "commonsense reasoning"; most notably, humans have powerful mechanisms for reasoning about "nave physics" such as space, time, and physical interactions. This enables even young children to easily make inferences like "If I roll this pen off a table, it will fall on the floor". Humans also have a powerful mechanism of "folk psychology" that helps them to interpret natural-language sentences such as "The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they advocated violence". (A generic AI has difficulty discerning whether the ones alleged to be advocating violence are the councilmen or the demonstrators.)[78][79][80] This lack of "common knowledge" means that AI often makes different mistakes than humans make, in ways that can seem incomprehensible. For example, existing self-driving cars cannot reason about the location nor the intentions of pedestrians in the exact way that humans do, and instead must use non-human modes of reasoning to avoid accidents.[81][82][83]

The cognitive capabilities of current architectures are very limited, using only a simplified version of what intelligence is really capable of. For instance, the human mind has come up with ways to reason beyond measure and logical explanations to different occurrences in life. What would have been otherwise straightforward, an equivalently difficult problem may be challenging to solve computationally as opposed to using the human mind. This gives rise to two classes of models: structuralist and functionalist. The structural models aim to loosely mimic the basic intelligence operations of the mind such as reasoning and logic. The functional model refers to the correlating data to its computed counterpart.[84]

The overall research goal of artificial intelligence is to create technology that allows computers and machines to function in an intelligent manner. The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken down into sub-problems. These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers expect an intelligent system to display. The traits described below have received the most attention.[15]

Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that humans use when they solve puzzles or make logical deductions.[85] By the late 1980s and 1990s, AI research had developed methods for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics.[86]

These algorithms proved to be insufficient for solving large reasoning problems, because they experienced a "combinatorial explosion": they became exponentially slower as the problems grew larger.[66] In fact, even humans rarely use the step-by-step deduction that early AI research was able to model. They solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive judgments.[87]

Knowledge representation[88] and knowledge engineering[89] are central to classical AI research. Some "expert systems" attempt to gather together explicit knowledge possessed by experts in some narrow domain. In addition, some projects attempt to gather the "commonsense knowledge" known to the average person into a database containing extensive knowledge about the world. Among the things a comprehensive commonsense knowledge base would contain are: objects, properties, categories and relations between objects;[90] situations, events, states and time;[91] causes and effects;[92] knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what other people know);[93] and many other, less well researched domains. A representation of "what exists" is an ontology: the set of objects, relations, concepts, and properties formally described so that software agents can interpret them. The semantics of these are captured as description logic concepts, roles, and individuals, and typically implemented as classes, properties, and individuals in the Web Ontology Language.[94] The most general ontologies are called upper ontologies, which attempt to provide a foundation for all other knowledge[95] by acting as mediators between domain ontologies that cover specific knowledge about a particular knowledge domain (field of interest or area of concern). Such formal knowledge representations can be used in content-based indexing and retrieval,[96] scene interpretation,[97] clinical decision support,[98] knowledge discovery (mining "interesting" and actionable inferences from large databases),[99] and other areas.[100]

Among the most difficult problems in knowledge representation are:

Intelligent agents must be able to set goals and achieve them.[107] They need a way to visualize the futurea representation of the state of the world and be able to make predictions about how their actions will change itand be able to make choices that maximize the utility (or "value") of available choices.[108]

In classical planning problems, the agent can assume that it is the only system acting in the world, allowing the agent to be certain of the consequences of its actions.[109] However, if the agent is not the only actor, then it requires that the agent can reason under uncertainty. This calls for an agent that can not only assess its environment and make predictions, but also evaluate its predictions and adapt based on its assessment.[110]

Multi-agent planning uses the cooperation and competition of many agents to achieve a given goal. Emergent behavior such as this is used by evolutionary algorithms and swarm intelligence.[111]

Machine learning (ML), a fundamental concept of AI research since the field's inception,[112] is the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience.[113][114]

Unsupervised learning is the ability to find patterns in a stream of input, without requiring a human to label the inputs first. Supervised learning includes both classification and numerical regression, which requires a human to label the input data first. Classification is used to determine what category something belongs in, and occurs after a program sees a number of examples of things from several categories. Regression is the attempt to produce a function that describes the relationship between inputs and outputs and predicts how the outputs should change as the inputs change.[114] Both classifiers and regression learners can be viewed as "function approximators" trying to learn an unknown (possibly implicit) function; for example, a spam classifier can be viewed as learning a function that maps from the text of an email to one of two categories, "spam" or "not spam". Computational learning theory can assess learners by computational complexity, by sample complexity (how much data is required), or by other notions of optimization.[115] In reinforcement learning[116] the agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones. The agent uses this sequence of rewards and punishments to form a strategy for operating in its problem space.

Natural language processing[117] (NLP) gives machines the ability to read and understand human language. A sufficiently powerful natural language processing system would enable natural-language user interfaces and the acquisition of knowledge directly from human-written sources, such as newswire texts. Some straightforward applications of natural language processing include information retrieval, text mining, question answering[118] and machine translation.[119] Many current approaches use word co-occurrence frequencies to construct syntactic representations of text. "Keyword spotting" strategies for search are popular and scalable but dumb; a search query for "dog" might only match documents with the literal word "dog" and miss a document with the word "poodle". "Lexical affinity" strategies use the occurrence of words such as "accident" to assess the sentiment of a document. Modern statistical NLP approaches can combine all these strategies as well as others, and often achieve acceptable accuracy at the page or paragraph level, but continue to lack the semantic understanding required to classify isolated sentences well. Besides the usual difficulties with encoding semantic commonsense knowledge, existing semantic NLP sometimes scales too poorly to be viable in business applications. Beyond semantic NLP, the ultimate goal of "narrative" NLP is to embody a full understanding of commonsense reasoning.[120]

Machine perception[121] is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras (visible spectrum or infrared), microphones, wireless signals, and active lidar, sonar, radar, and tactile sensors) to deduce aspects of the world. Applications include speech recognition,[122] facial recognition, and object recognition.[123] Computer vision is the ability to analyze visual input. Such input is usually ambiguous; a giant, fifty-meter-tall pedestrian far away may produce exactly the same pixels as a nearby normal-sized pedestrian, requiring the AI to judge the relative likelihood and reasonableness of different interpretations, for example by using its "object model" to assess that fifty-meter pedestrians do not exist.[124]

AI is heavily used in robotics.[125] Advanced robotic arms and other industrial robots, widely used in modern factories, can learn from experience how to move efficiently despite the presence of friction and gear slippage.[126] A modern mobile robot, when given a small, static, and visible environment, can easily determine its location and map its environment; however, dynamic environments, such as (in endoscopy) the interior of a patient's breathing body, pose a greater challenge. Motion planning is the process of breaking down a movement task into "primitives" such as individual joint movements. Such movement often involves compliant motion, a process where movement requires maintaining physical contact with an object.[128][129] Moravec's paradox generalizes that low-level sensorimotor skills that humans take for granted are, counterintuitively, difficult to program into a robot; the paradox is named after Hans Moravec, who stated in 1988 that "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility".[130][131] This is attributed to the fact that, unlike checkers, physical dexterity has been a direct target of natural selection for millions of years.[132]

Moravec's paradox can be extended to many forms of social intelligence.[134][135] Distributed multi-agent coordination of autonomous vehicles remains a difficult problem.[136] Affective computing is an interdisciplinary umbrella that comprises systems which recognize, interpret, process, or simulate human affects. Moderate successes related to affective computing include textual sentiment analysis and, more recently, multimodal affect analysis (see multimodal sentiment analysis), wherein AI classifies the affects displayed by a videotaped subject.[140]

In the long run, social skills and an understanding of human emotion and game theory would be valuable to a social agent. Being able to predict the actions of others by understanding their motives and emotional states would allow an agent to make better decisions. Some computer systems mimic human emotion and expressions to appear more sensitive to the emotional dynamics of human interaction, or to otherwise facilitate humancomputer interaction.[141] Similarly, some virtual assistants are programmed to speak conversationally or even to banter humorously; this tends to give nave users an unrealistic conception of how intelligent existing computer agents actually are.[142]

Historically, projects such as the Cyc knowledge base (1984) and the massive Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems initiative (19821992) attempted to cover the breadth of human cognition. These early projects failed to escape the limitations of non-quantitative symbolic logic models and, in retrospect, greatly underestimated the difficulty of cross-domain AI. Nowadays, the vast majority of current AI researchers work instead on tractable "narrow AI" applications (such as medical diagnosis or automobile navigation).[143] Many researchers predict that such "narrow AI" work in different individual domains will eventually be incorporated into a machine with artificial general intelligence (AGI), combining most of the narrow skills mentioned in this article and at some point even exceeding human ability in most or all these areas.[19][144] Many advances have general, cross-domain significance. One high-profile example is that DeepMind in the 2010s developed a "generalized artificial intelligence" that could learn many diverse Atari games on its own, and later developed a variant of the system which succeeds at sequential learning.[145][146][147] Besides transfer learning,[148] hypothetical AGI breakthroughs could include the development of reflective architectures that can engage in decision-theoretic metareasoning, and figuring out how to "slurp up" a comprehensive knowledge base from the entire unstructured Web. Some argue that some kind of (currently-undiscovered) conceptually straightforward, but mathematically difficult, "Master Algorithm" could lead to AGI. Finally, a few "emergent" approaches look to simulating human intelligence extremely closely, and believe that anthropomorphic features like an artificial brain or simulated child development may someday reach a critical point where general intelligence emerges.[150][151]

Many of the problems in this article may also require general intelligence, if machines are to solve the problems as well as people do. For example, even specific straightforward tasks, like machine translation, require that a machine read and write in both languages (NLP), follow the author's argument (reason), know what is being talked about (knowledge), and faithfully reproduce the author's original intent (social intelligence). A problem like machine translation is considered "AI-complete", because all of these problems need to be solved simultaneously in order to reach human-level machine performance.

There is no established unifying theory or paradigm that guides AI research. Researchers disagree about many issues.[152] A few of the most long standing questions that have remained unanswered are these: should artificial intelligence simulate natural intelligence by studying psychology or neurobiology? Or is human biology as irrelevant to AI research as bird biology is to aeronautical engineering?[16]Can intelligent behavior be described using simple, elegant principles (such as logic or optimization)? Or does it necessarily require solving a large number of completely unrelated problems?[17]

In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of researchers explored the connection between neurobiology, information theory, and cybernetics. Some of them built machines that used electronic networks to exhibit rudimentary intelligence, such as W. Grey Walter's turtles and the Johns Hopkins Beast. Many of these researchers gathered for meetings of the Teleological Society at Princeton University and the Ratio Club in England.[153] By 1960, this approach was largely abandoned, although elements of it would be revived in the 1980s.

When access to digital computers became possible in the mid 1950s, AI research began to explore the possibility that human intelligence could be reduced to symbol manipulation. The research was centered in three institutions: Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford and MIT, and as described below, each one developed its own style of research. John Haugeland named these symbolic approaches to AI "good old fashioned AI" or "GOFAI".[154] During the 1960s, symbolic approaches had achieved great success at simulating high-level "thinking" in small demonstration programs. Approaches based on cybernetics or artificial neural networks were abandoned or pushed into the background.[155]Researchers in the 1960s and the 1970s were convinced that symbolic approaches would eventually succeed in creating a machine with artificial general intelligence and considered this the goal of their field.

Economist Herbert Simon and Allen Newell studied human problem-solving skills and attempted to formalize them, and their work laid the foundations of the field of artificial intelligence, as well as cognitive science, operations research and management science. Their research team used the results of psychological experiments to develop programs that simulated the techniques that people used to solve problems. This tradition, centered at Carnegie Mellon University would eventually culminate in the development of the Soar architecture in the middle 1980s.[156][157]

Unlike Simon and Newell, John McCarthy felt that machines did not need to simulate human thought, but should instead try to find the essence of abstract reasoning and problem-solving, regardless whether people used the same algorithms.[16] His laboratory at Stanford (SAIL) focused on using formal logic to solve a wide variety of problems, including knowledge representation, planning and learning.[158] Logic was also the focus of the work at the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere in Europe which led to the development of the programming language Prolog and the science of logic programming.[159]

Researchers at MIT (such as Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert)[160] found that solving difficult problems in vision and natural language processing required ad-hoc solutionsthey argued that there was no simple and general principle (like logic) that would capture all the aspects of intelligent behavior. Roger Schank described their "anti-logic" approaches as "scruffy" (as opposed to the "neat" paradigms at CMU and Stanford).[17] Commonsense knowledge bases (such as Doug Lenat's Cyc) are an example of "scruffy" AI, since they must be built by hand, one complicated concept at a time.[161]

When computers with large memories became available around 1970, researchers from all three traditions began to build knowledge into AI applications.[162] This "knowledge revolution" led to the development and deployment of expert systems (introduced by Edward Feigenbaum), the first truly successful form of AI software.[41] A key component of the system architecture for all expert systems is the knowledge base, which stores facts and rules that illustrate AI.[163] The knowledge revolution was also driven by the realization that enormous amounts of knowledge would be required by many simple AI applications.

By the 1980s, progress in symbolic AI seemed to stall and many believed that symbolic systems would never be able to imitate all the processes of human cognition, especially perception, robotics, learning and pattern recognition. A number of researchers began to look into "sub-symbolic" approaches to specific AI problems.[18] Sub-symbolic methods manage to approach intelligence without specific representations of knowledge.

This includes embodied, situated, behavior-based, and nouvelle AI. Researchers from the related field of robotics, such as Rodney Brooks, rejected symbolic AI and focused on the basic engineering problems that would allow robots to move and survive.[164] Their work revived the non-symbolic point of view of the early cybernetics researchers of the 1950s and reintroduced the use of control theory in AI. This coincided with the development of the embodied mind thesis in the related field of cognitive science: the idea that aspects of the body (such as movement, perception and visualization) are required for higher intelligence.

Within developmental robotics, developmental learning approaches are elaborated upon to allow robots to accumulate repertoires of novel skills through autonomous self-exploration, social interaction with human teachers, and the use of guidance mechanisms (active learning, maturation, motor synergies, etc.).[165][166]

Interest in neural networks and "connectionism" was revived by David Rumelhart and others in the middle of the 1980s.[169] Artificial neural networks are an example of soft computingthey are solutions to problems which cannot be solved with complete logical certainty, and where an approximate solution is often sufficient. Other soft computing approaches to AI include fuzzy systems, Grey system theory, evolutionary computation and many statistical tools. The application of soft computing to AI is studied collectively by the emerging discipline of computational intelligence.[170]

Much of traditional GOFAI got bogged down on ad hoc patches to symbolic computation that worked on their own toy models but failed to generalize to real-world results. However, around the 1990s, AI researchers adopted sophisticated mathematical tools, such as hidden Markov models (HMM), information theory, and normative Bayesian decision theory to compare or to unify competing architectures. The shared mathematical language permitted a high level of collaboration with more established fields (like mathematics, economics or operations research).[d] Compared with GOFAI, new "statistical learning" techniques such as HMM and neural networks were gaining higher levels of accuracy in many practical domains such as data mining, without necessarily acquiring a semantic understanding of the datasets. The increased successes with real-world data led to increasing emphasis on comparing different approaches against shared test data to see which approach performed best in a broader context than that provided by idiosyncratic toy models; AI research was becoming more scientific. Nowadays results of experiments are often rigorously measurable, and are sometimes (with difficulty) reproducible.[43][171] Different statistical learning techniques have different limitations; for example, basic HMM cannot model the infinite possible combinations of natural language. Critics note that the shift from GOFAI to statistical learning is often also a shift away from explainable AI. In AGI research, some scholars caution against over-reliance on statistical learning, and argue that continuing research into GOFAI will still be necessary to attain general intelligence.

AI has developed many tools to solve the most difficult problems in computer science. A few of the most general of these methods are discussed below.

Many problems in AI can be solved in theory by intelligently searching through many possible solutions:[181] Reasoning can be reduced to performing a search. For example, logical proof can be viewed as searching for a path that leads from premises to conclusions, where each step is the application of an inference rule.[182] Planning algorithms search through trees of goals and subgoals, attempting to find a path to a target goal, a process called means-ends analysis.[183] Robotics algorithms for moving limbs and grasping objects use local searches in configuration space.[126] Many learning algorithms use search algorithms based on optimization.

Simple exhaustive searches[184] are rarely sufficient for most real-world problems: the search space (the number of places to search) quickly grows to astronomical numbers. The result is a search that is too slow or never completes. The solution, for many problems, is to use "heuristics" or "rules of thumb" that prioritize choices in favor of those that are more likely to reach a goal and to do so in a shorter number of steps. In some search methodologies heuristics can also serve to entirely eliminate some choices that are unlikely to lead to a goal (called "pruning the search tree"). Heuristics supply the program with a "best guess" for the path on which the solution lies.[185] Heuristics limit the search for solutions into a smaller sample size.

A very different kind of search came to prominence in the 1990s, based on the mathematical theory of optimization. For many problems, it is possible to begin the search with some form of a guess and then refine the guess incrementally until no more refinements can be made. These algorithms can be visualized as blind hill climbing: we begin the search at a random point on the landscape, and then, by jumps or steps, we keep moving our guess uphill, until we reach the top. Other optimization algorithms are simulated annealing, beam search and random optimization.[186]

Evolutionary computation uses a form of optimization search. For example, they may begin with a population of organisms (the guesses) and then allow them to mutate and recombine, selecting only the fittest to survive each generation (refining the guesses). Classic evolutionary algorithms include genetic algorithms, gene expression programming, and genetic programming.[187] Alternatively, distributed search processes can coordinate via swarm intelligence algorithms. Two popular swarm algorithms used in search are particle swarm optimization (inspired by bird flocking) and ant colony optimization (inspired by ant trails).[188][189]

Logic[190] is used for knowledge representation and problem solving, but it can be applied to other problems as well. For example, the satplan algorithm uses logic for planning[191] and inductive logic programming is a method for learning.[192]

Several different forms of logic are used in AI research. Propositional logic[193] involves truth functions such as "or" and "not". First-order logic[194] adds quantifiers and predicates, and can express facts about objects, their properties, and their relations with each other. Fuzzy set theory assigns a "degree of truth" (between 0 and 1) to vague statements such as "Alice is old" (or rich, or tall, or hungry) that are too linguistically imprecise to be completely true or false. Fuzzy logic is successfully used in control systems to allow experts to contribute vague rules such as "if you are close to the destination station and moving fast, increase the train's brake pressure"; these vague rules can then be numerically refined within the system. Fuzzy logic fails to scale well in knowledge bases; many AI researchers question the validity of chaining fuzzy-logic inferences.[e][196][197]

Default logics, non-monotonic logics and circumscription[102] are forms of logic designed to help with default reasoning and the qualification problem. Several extensions of logic have been designed to handle specific domains of knowledge, such as: description logics;[90] situation calculus, event calculus and fluent calculus (for representing events and time);[91] causal calculus;[92] belief calculus (belief revision);[198] and modal logics.[93] Logics to model contradictory or inconsistent statements arising in multi-agent systems have also been designed, such as paraconsistent logics.

Many problems in AI (in reasoning, planning, learning, perception, and robotics) require the agent to operate with incomplete or uncertain information. AI researchers have devised a number of powerful tools to solve these problems using methods from probability theory and economics.[199]

Bayesian networks[200] are a very general tool that can be used for various problems: reasoning (using the Bayesian inference algorithm),[201] learning (using the expectation-maximization algorithm),[f][203] planning (using decision networks)[204] and perception (using dynamic Bayesian networks).[205] Probabilistic algorithms can also be used for filtering, prediction, smoothing and finding explanations for streams of data, helping perception systems to analyze processes that occur over time (e.g., hidden Markov models or Kalman filters).[205] Compared with symbolic logic, formal Bayesian inference is computationally expensive. For inference to be tractable, most observations must be conditionally independent of one another. Complicated graphs with diamonds or other "loops" (undirected cycles) can require a sophisticated method such as Markov chain Monte Carlo, which spreads an ensemble of random walkers throughout the Bayesian network and attempts to converge to an assessment of the conditional probabilities. Bayesian networks are used on Xbox Live to rate and match players; wins and losses are "evidence" of how good a player is[citation needed]. AdSense uses a Bayesian network with over 300 million edges to learn which ads to serve.

A key concept from the science of economics is "utility": a measure of how valuable something is to an intelligent agent. Precise mathematical tools have been developed that analyze how an agent can make choices and plan, using decision theory, decision analysis,[207] and information value theory.[108] These tools include models such as Markov decision processes,[208] dynamic decision networks,[205] game theory and mechanism design.[209]

The simplest AI applications can be divided into two types: classifiers ("if shiny then diamond") and controllers ("if shiny then pick up"). Controllers do, however, also classify conditions before inferring actions, and therefore classification forms a central part of many AI systems. Classifiers are functions that use pattern matching to determine a closest match. They can be tuned according to examples, making them very attractive for use in AI. These examples are known as observations or patterns. In supervised learning, each pattern belongs to a certain predefined class. A class can be seen as a decision that has to be made. All the observations combined with their class labels are known as a data set. When a new observation is received, that observation is classified based on previous experience.[210]

A classifier can be trained in various ways; there are many statistical and machine learning approaches. The decision tree[211] is perhaps the most widely used machine learning algorithm. Other widely used classifiers are the neural network,[213]k-nearest neighbor algorithm,[g][215]kernel methods such as the support vector machine (SVM),[h][217]Gaussian mixture model,[218] and the extremely popular naive Bayes classifier.[i][220] Classifier performance depends greatly on the characteristics of the data to be classified, such as the dataset size, distribution of samples across classes, the dimensionality, and the level of noise. Model-based classifiers perform well if the assumed model is an extremely good fit for the actual data. Otherwise, if no matching model is available, and if accuracy (rather than speed or scalability) is the sole concern, conventional wisdom is that discriminative classifiers (especially SVM) tend to be more accurate than model-based classifiers such as "naive Bayes" on most practical data sets.[221]

Neural networks were inspired by the architecture of neurons in the human brain. A simple "neuron" N accepts input from other neurons, each of which, when activated (or "fired"), cast a weighted "vote" for or against whether neuron N should itself activate. Learning requires an algorithm to adjust these weights based on the training data; one simple algorithm (dubbed "fire together, wire together") is to increase the weight between two connected neurons when the activation of one triggers the successful activation of another. The neural network forms "concepts" that are distributed among a subnetwork of shared[j] neurons that tend to fire together; a concept meaning "leg" might be coupled with a subnetwork meaning "foot" that includes the sound for "foot". Neurons have a continuous spectrum of activation; in addition, neurons can process inputs in a nonlinear way rather than weighing straightforward votes. Modern neural networks can learn both continuous functions and, surprisingly, digital logical operations. Neural networks' early successes included predicting the stock market and (in 1995) a mostly self-driving car.[k] In the 2010s, advances in neural networks using deep learning thrust AI into widespread public consciousness and contributed to an enormous upshift in corporate AI spending; for example, AI-related M&A in 2017 was over 25 times as large as in 2015.[224][225]

The study of non-learning artificial neural networks[213] began in the decade before the field of AI research was founded, in the work of Walter Pitts and Warren McCullouch. Frank Rosenblatt invented the perceptron, a learning network with a single layer, similar to the old concept of linear regression. Early pioneers also include Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko, Teuvo Kohonen, Stephen Grossberg, Kunihiko Fukushima, Christoph von der Malsburg, David Willshaw, Shun-Ichi Amari, Bernard Widrow, John Hopfield, Eduardo R. Caianiello, and others[citation needed].

The main categories of networks are acyclic or feedforward neural networks (where the signal passes in only one direction) and recurrent neural networks (which allow feedback and short-term memories of previous input events). Among the most popular feedforward networks are perceptrons, multi-layer perceptrons and radial basis networks.[226] Neural networks can be applied to the problem of intelligent control (for robotics) or learning, using such techniques as Hebbian learning ("fire together, wire together"), GMDH or competitive learning.[227]

Today, neural networks are often trained by the backpropagation algorithm, which had been around since 1970 as the reverse mode of automatic differentiation published by Seppo Linnainmaa,[228][229] and was introduced to neural networks by Paul Werbos.[230][231][232]

Hierarchical temporal memory is an approach that models some of the structural and algorithmic properties of the neocortex.[233]

To summarize, most neural networks use some form of gradient descent on a hand-created neural topology. However, some research groups, such as Uber, argue that simple neuroevolution to mutate new neural network topologies and weights may be competitive with sophisticated gradient descent approaches[citation needed]. One advantage of neuroevolution is that it may be less prone to get caught in "dead ends".[234]

Deep learning is any artificial neural network that can learn a long chain of causal links[dubious discuss]. For example, a feedforward network with six hidden layers can learn a seven-link causal chain (six hidden layers + output layer) and has a "credit assignment path" (CAP) depth of seven[citation needed]. Many deep learning systems need to be able to learn chains ten or more causal links in length.[235] Deep learning has transformed many important subfields of artificial intelligence[why?], including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and others.[236][237][235]

According to one overview,[238] the expression "Deep Learning" was introduced to the machine learning community by Rina Dechter in 1986[239] and gained traction afterIgor Aizenberg and colleagues introduced it to artificial neural networks in 2000.[240] The first functional Deep Learning networks were published by Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko and V. G. Lapa in 1965.[241][pageneeded] These networks are trained one layer at a time. Ivakhnenko's 1971 paper[242] describes the learning of a deep feedforward multilayer perceptron with eight layers, already much deeper than many later networks. In 2006, a publication by Geoffrey Hinton and Ruslan Salakhutdinov introduced another way of pre-training many-layered feedforward neural networks (FNNs) one layer at a time, treating each layer in turn as an unsupervised restricted Boltzmann machine, then using supervised backpropagation for fine-tuning. Similar to shallow artificial neural networks, deep neural networks can model complex non-linear relationships. Over the last few years, advances in both machine learning algorithms and computer hardware have led to more efficient methods for training deep neural networks that contain many layers of non-linear hidden units and a very large output layer.[244]

Deep learning often uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs), whose origins can be traced back to the Neocognitron introduced by Kunihiko Fukushima in 1980.[245] In 1989, Yann LeCun and colleagues applied backpropagation to such an architecture. In the early 2000s, in an industrial application, CNNs already processed an estimated 10% to 20% of all the checks written in the US.[246]Since 2011, fast implementations of CNNs on GPUs havewon many visual pattern recognition competitions.[235]

CNNs with 12 convolutional layers were used in conjunction with reinforcement learning by Deepmind's "AlphaGo Lee", the program that beat a top Go champion in 2016.[247]

Early on, deep learning was also applied to sequence learning with recurrent neural networks (RNNs)[248] which are in theory Turing complete[249] and can run arbitrary programs to process arbitrary sequences of inputs. The depth of an RNN is unlimited and depends on the length of its input sequence; thus, an RNN is an example of deep learning.[235] RNNs can be trained by gradient descent[250][251][252] but suffer from the vanishing gradient problem.[236][253] In 1992, it was shown that unsupervised pre-training of a stack of recurrent neural networks can speed up subsequent supervised learning of deep sequential problems.[254]

Numerous researchers now use variants of a deep learning recurrent NN called the long short-term memory (LSTM) network published by Hochreiter & Schmidhuber in 1997.[255] LSTM is often trained by Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC).[256] At Google, Microsoft and Baidu this approach has revolutionized speech recognition.[257][258][259] For example, in 2015, Google's speech recognition experienced a dramatic performance jump of 49% through CTC-trained LSTM, which is now available through Google Voice to billions of smartphone users.[260] Google also used LSTM to improve machine translation,[261] Language Modeling[262] and Multilingual Language Processing.[263] LSTM combined with CNNs also improved automatic image captioning[264] and a plethora of other applications.

AI, like electricity or the steam engine, is a general purpose technology. There is no consensus on how to characterize which tasks AI tends to excel at.[265] While projects such as AlphaZero have succeeded in generating their own knowledge from scratch, many other machine learning projects require large training datasets.[266][267] Researcher Andrew Ng has suggested, as a "highly imperfect rule of thumb", that "almost anything a typical human can do with less than one second of mental thought, we can probably now or in the near future automate using AI."[268] Moravec's paradox suggests that AI lags humans at many tasks that the human brain has specifically evolved to perform well.[132]

Games provide a well-publicized benchmark for assessing rates of progress. AlphaGo around 2016 brought the era of classical board-game benchmarks to a close. Games of imperfect knowledge provide new challenges to AI in the area of game theory.[269][270] E-sports such as StarCraft continue to provide additional public benchmarks.[271][272] There are many competitions and prizes, such as the Imagenet Challenge, to promote research in artificial intelligence. The most common areas of competition include general machine intelligence, conversational behavior, data-mining, robotic cars, and robot soccer as well as conventional games.[273]

The "imitation game" (an interpretation of the 1950 Turing test that assesses whether a computer can imitate a human) is nowadays considered too exploitable to be a meaningful benchmark.[274] A derivative of the Turing test is the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA). As the name implies, this helps to determine that a user is an actual person and not a computer posing as a human. In contrast to the standard Turing test, CAPTCHA is administered by a machine and targeted to a human as opposed to being administered by a human and targeted to a machine. A computer asks a user to complete a simple test then generates a grade for that test. Computers are unable to solve the problem, so correct solutions are deemed to be the result of a person taking the test. A common type of CAPTCHA is the test that requires the typing of distorted letters, numbers or symbols that appear in an image undecipherable by a computer.

Proposed "universal intelligence" tests aim to compare how well machines, humans, and even non-human animals perform on problem sets that are generic as possible. At an extreme, the test suite can contain every possible problem, weighted by Kolmogorov complexity; unfortunately, these problem sets tend to be dominated by impoverished pattern-matching exercises where a tuned AI can easily exceed human performance levels.[276][277]

AI is relevant to any intellectual task. Modern artificial intelligence techniques are pervasive[279] and are too numerous to list here. Frequently, when a technique reaches mainstream use, it is no longer considered artificial intelligence; this phenomenon is described as the AI effect.

High-profile examples of AI include autonomous vehicles (such as drones and self-driving cars), medical diagnosis, creating art (such as poetry), proving mathematical theorems, playing games (such as Chess or Go), search engines (such as Google search), online assistants (such as Siri), image recognition in photographs, spam filtering, predicting flight delays,[281] prediction of judicial decisions,[282] targeting online advertisements, [283][284] and energy storage[285]

With social media sites overtaking TV as a source for news for young people and news organizations increasingly reliant on social media platforms for generating distribution,[286] major publishers now use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to post stories more effectively and generate higher volumes of traffic.[287]

AI can also produce Deepfakes, a content-altering technology. ZDNet reports, "It presents something that did not actually occur, Though 88% of Americans believe Deepfakes can cause more harm than good, only 47% of them believe they can be targeted. The boom of election year also opens public discourse to threats of videos of falsified politician media.[288]

AI in healthcare is often used for classification, whether to automate initial evaluation of a CT scan or EKG or to identify high risk patients for population health. The breadth of applications is rapidly increasing.As an example, AI is being applied to the high cost problem of dosage issueswhere findings suggested that AI could save $16 billion. In 2016, a ground breaking study in California found that a mathematical formula developed with the help of AI correctly determined the accurate dose of immunosuppressant drugs to give to organ patients.[289]

Artificial intelligence is assisting doctors. According to Bloomberg Technology, Microsoft has developed AI to help doctors find the right treatments for cancer.[290] There is a great amount of research and drugs developed relating to cancer. In detail, there are more than 800 medicines and vaccines to treat cancer. This negatively affects the doctors, because there are too many options to choose from, making it more difficult to choose the right drugs for the patients. Microsoft is working on a project to develop a machine called "Hanover"[citation needed]. Its goal is to memorize all the papers necessary to cancer and help predict which combinations of drugs will be most effective for each patient. One project that is being worked on at the moment is fighting myeloid leukemia, a fatal cancer where the treatment has not improved in decades. Another study was reported to have found that artificial intelligence was as good as trained doctors in identifying skin cancers.[291] Another study is using artificial intelligence to try to monitor multiple high-risk patients, and this is done by asking each patient numerous questions based on data acquired from live doctor to patient interactions.[292] One study was done with transfer learning, the machine performed a diagnosis similarly to a well-trained ophthalmologist, and could generate a decision within 30 seconds on whether or not the patient should be referred for treatment, with more than 95% accuracy.[293]

According to CNN, a recent study by surgeons at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington successfully demonstrated surgery with an autonomous robot. The team supervised the robot while it performed soft-tissue surgery, stitching together a pig's bowel during open surgery, and doing so better than a human surgeon, the team claimed.[294] IBM has created its own artificial intelligence computer, the IBM Watson, which has beaten human intelligence (at some levels). Watson has struggled to achieve success and adoption in healthcare.[295]

Advancements in AI have contributed to the growth of the automotive industry through the creation and evolution of self-driving vehicles. As of 2016[update], there are over 30 companies utilizing AI into the creation of self-driving cars. A few companies involved with AI include Tesla, Google, and Apple.[296]

Many components contribute to the functioning of self-driving cars. These vehicles incorporate systems such as braking, lane changing, collision prevention, navigation and mapping. Together, these systems, as well as high performance computers, are integrated into one complex vehicle.[297]

Recent developments in autonomous automobiles have made the innovation of self-driving trucks possible, though they are still in the testing phase. The UK government has passed legislation to begin testing of self-driving truck platoons in 2018.[298] Self-driving truck platoons are a fleet of self-driving trucks following the lead of one non-self-driving truck, so the truck platoons aren't entirely autonomous yet. Meanwhile, the Daimler, a German automobile corporation, is testing the Freightliner Inspiration which is a semi-autonomous truck that will only be used on the highway.[299]

One main factor that influences the ability for a driver-less automobile to function is mapping. In general, the vehicle would be pre-programmed with a map of the area being driven. This map would include data on the approximations of street light and curb heights in order for the vehicle to be aware of its surroundings. However, Google has been working on an algorithm with the purpose of eliminating the need for pre-programmed maps and instead, creating a device that would be able to adjust to a variety of new surroundings.[300] Some self-driving cars are not equipped with steering wheels or brake pedals, so there has also been research focused on creating an algorithm that is capable of maintaining a safe environment for the passengers in the vehicle through awareness of speed and driving conditions.[301]

Another factor that is influencing the ability of a driver-less automobile is the safety of the passenger. To make a driver-less automobile, engineers must program it to handle high-risk situations. These situations could include a head-on collision with pedestrians. The car's main goal should be to make a decision that would avoid hitting the pedestrians and saving the passengers in the car. But there is a possibility the car would need to make a decision that would put someone in danger. In other words, the car would need to decide to save the pedestrians or the passengers.[302] The programming of the car in these situations is crucial to a successful driver-less automobile.

Financial institutions have long used artificial neural network systems to detect charges or claims outside of the norm, flagging these for human investigation. The use of AI in banking can be traced back to 1987 when Security Pacific National Bank in US set-up a Fraud Prevention Task force to counter the unauthorized use of debit cards.[303] Programs like Kasisto and Moneystream are using AI in financial services.

Banks use artificial intelligence systems today to organize operations, maintain book-keeping, invest in stocks, and manage properties. AI can react to changes overnight or when business is not taking place.[304] In August 2001, robots beat humans in a simulated financial trading competition.[305] AI has also reduced fraud and financial crimes by monitoring behavioral patterns of users for any abnormal changes or anomalies.[306][307][308]

AI is also being used by corporations. Whereas AI CEO's are still 30 years away,[309][310] robotic process automation (RPA) is already being used today in corporate finance. RPA uses artificial intelligence to train and teach software robots to process transactions, monitor compliance and audit processes automatically.[311]

The use of AI machines in the market in applications such as online trading and decision making has changed major economic theories.[312] For example, AI based buying and selling platforms have changed the law of supply and demand in that it is now possible to easily estimate individualized demand and supply curves and thus individualized pricing. Furthermore, AI machines reduce information asymmetry in the market and thus making markets more efficient while reducing the volume of trades[citation needed]. Furthermore, AI in the markets limits the consequences of behavior in the markets again making markets more efficient[citation needed]. Other theories where AI has had impact include in rational choice, rational expectations, game theory, Lewis turning point, portfolio optimization and counterfactual thinking[citation needed].. In August 2019, the AICPA introduced AI training course for accounting professionals.[313]

The cybersecurity arena faces significant challenges in the form of larges scale hacking attacks of different types which harm organizations of all kinds and create billions of dollars in business damage. Artificial intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLP) has begun to be used by security companies - for example SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions. The more advanced of these solutions use AI and NLP to automatically sort the data in networks into high risk and low risk information. This enables security teams to focus on the attacks that have the potential to do real harm to the organization, and not become victims of attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS), Malware and others.

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Artificial intelligence - Wikipedia

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Definition

What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. The term may also be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind such as learning and problem-solving.

The ideal characteristic of artificial intelligence is its ability to rationalize and take actions that have the best chance of achieving a specific goal.

When most people hear the term artificial intelligence, the first thing they usually think of is robots. That's because big-budget films and novels weave stories about human-like machines that wreak havoc on Earth. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Artificial intelligence is based on the principle that human intelligence can be defined in a way that a machine can easily mimic it and execute tasks, from the most simple to those that are even more complex. The goals of artificial intelligence include learning, reasoning, and perception.

As technology advances, previous benchmarks that defined artificial intelligence become outdated. For example, machines that calculate basic functions or recognize text through optimal character recognition are no longer considered to embody artificial intelligence, since this function is now taken for granted as an inherent computer function.

AI is continuously evolving to benefit many different industries. Machines are wired using a cross-disciplinary approach based in mathematics, computer science, linguistics, psychology,and more.

Algorithms often play a very important part in the structure of artificial intelligence, where simple algorithms are used in simple applications, while more complex ones help frame strong artificial intelligence.

The applications for artificial intelligence are endless. The technology can be applied to many different sectors and industries. AI is being tested and used in the healthcare industry for dosing drugs and different treatment in patients, and for surgical procedures in the operating room.

Other examples of machines with artificial intelligence include computers that play chess and self-driving cars. Each of these machines must weigh the consequences of any action they take, as each action will impact the end result. In chess, the end result is winning the game. For self-driving cars, the computer system must account for all external data and compute it to act in a way that prevents a collision.

Artificial intelligence also has applications in the financial industry, where it is used to detect and flag activity in banking and finance such as unusual debit card usage and large account depositsall of which help a bank's fraud department. Applications for AI are also being used to help streamline and make trading easier. This is done by making supply, demand, and pricing of securities easier to estimate.

Artificial intelligence can be divided into two different categories: weak and strong. Weak artificial intelligence embodies a system designed to carry out one particular job. Weak AI systems include video games such as the chess example from above and personal assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri. You ask the assistant a question, it answers it for you.

Strong artificial intelligence systems are systems that carry on the tasks considered to be human-like. These tend to be more complex and complicated systems. They are programmed to handle situations in which they may be required to problem solve without having a person intervene. These kinds of systems can be found in applications like self-driving cars or in hospital operating rooms.

Since its beginning, artificial intelligence has come under scrutiny from scientists and the public alike. One common theme is the idea that machines will become so highly developed that humans will not be able to keep up and they will take off on their own, redesigning themselves at an exponential rate.

Another is that machines can hack into people's privacy and even be weaponized.Other arguments debate the ethics of artificial intelligence and whether intelligent systems such as robots should be treated with the same rights as humans.

Self-driving cars have been fairly controversial as their machines tend to be designed for the lowest possible risk and the least casualties. If presented with a scenario of colliding with one person or another at the same time, these cars would calculate the option that would cause the least amount of damage.

Another contentious issue many people have with artificial intelligence is how it may affect human employment. With many industries looking to automate certain jobs through the use of intelligent machinery, there is a concern that people would be pushed out of the workforce. Self-driving cars may remove the need for taxis and car-share programs, while manufacturers may easily replace human labor with machines, making people's skills more obsolete.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) Definition

What is artificial intelligence? – Brookings

Few concepts are as poorly understood as artificial intelligence. Opinion surveys show that even top business leaders lack a detailed sense of AI and that many ordinary people confuse it with super-powered robots or hyper-intelligent devices. Hollywood helps little in this regard by fusing robots and advanced software into self-replicating automatons such as the Terminators Skynet or the evil HAL seen in Arthur Clarkes 2001: A Space Odyssey, which goes rogue after humans plan to deactivate it. The lack of clarity around the term enables technology pessimists to warn AI will conquer humans, suppress individual freedom, and destroy personal privacy through a digital 1984.

Part of the problem is the lack of a uniformly agreed upon definition. Alan Turing generally is credited with the origin of the concept when he speculated in 1950 about thinking machines that could reason at the level of a human being. His well-known Turing Test specifies that computers need to complete reasoning puzzles as well as humans in order to be considered thinking in an autonomous manner.

Turing was followed up a few years later by John McCarthy, who first used the term artificial intelligence to denote machines that could think autonomously. He described the threshold as getting a computer to do things which, when done by people, are said to involve intelligence.

Since the 1950s, scientists have argued over what constitutes thinking and intelligence, and what is fully autonomous when it comes to hardware and software. Advanced computers such as the IBM Watson already have beaten humans at chess and are capable of instantly processing enormous amounts of information.

The lack of clarity around the term enables technology pessimists to warn AI will conquer humans, suppress individual freedom, and destroy personal privacy through a digital 1984.

Today, AI generally is thought to refer to machines that respond to stimulation consistent with traditional responses from humans, given the human capacity for contemplation, judgment, and intention. According to researchers Shubhendu and Vijay, these software systems make decisions which normally require [a] human level of expertise and help people anticipate problems or deal with issues as they come up. As argued by John Allen and myself in an April 2018 paper, such systems have three qualities that constitute the essence of artificial intelligence: intentionality, intelligence, and adaptability.

In the remainder of this paper, I discuss these qualities and why it is important to make sure each accords with basic human values. Each of the AI features has the potential to move civilization forward in progressive ways. But without adequate safeguards or the incorporation of ethical considerations, the AI utopia can quickly turn into dystopia.

Artificial intelligence algorithms are designed to make decisions, often using real-time data. They are unlike passive machines that are capable only of mechanical or predetermined responses. Using sensors, digital data, or remote inputs, they combine information from a variety of different sources, analyze the material instantly, and act on the insights derived from those data. As such, they are designed by humans with intentionality and reach conclusions based on their instant analysis.

An example from the transportation industry shows how this happens. Autonomous vehicles are equipped with LIDARS (light detection and ranging) and remote sensors that gather information from the vehicles surroundings. The LIDAR uses light from a radar to see objects in front of and around the vehicle and make instantaneous decisions regarding the presence of objects, distances, and whether the car is about to hit something. On-board computers combine this information with sensor data to determine whether there are any dangerous conditions, the vehicle needs to shift lanes, or it should slow or stop completely. All of that material has to be analyzed instantly to avoid crashes and keep the vehicle in the proper lane.

With massive improvements in storage systems, processing speeds, and analytic techniques, these algorithms are capable of tremendous sophistication in analysis and decisionmaking. Financial algorithms can spot minute differentials in stock valuations and undertake market transactions that take advantage of that information. The same logic applies in environmental sustainability systems that use sensors to determine whether someone is in a room and automatically adjusts heating, cooling, and lighting based on that information. The goal is to conserve energy and use resources in an optimal manner.

As long as these systems conform to important human values, there is little risk of AI going rogue or endangering human beings. Computers can be intentional while analyzing information in ways that augment humans or help them perform at a higher level. However, if the software is poorly designed or based on incomplete or biased information, it can endanger humanity or replicate past injustices.

AI often is undertaken in conjunction with machine learning and data analytics, and the resulting combination enables intelligent decisionmaking. Machine learning takes data and looks for underlying trends. If it spots something that is relevant for a practical problem, software designers can take that knowledge and use it with data analytics to understand specific issues.

For example, there are AI systems for managing school enrollments. They compile information on neighborhood location, desired schools, substantive interests, and the like, and assign pupils to particular schools based on that material. As long as there is little contentiousness or disagreement regarding basic criteria, these systems work intelligently and effectively.

Figuring out how to reconcile conflicting values is one of the most important challenges facing AI designers. It is vital that they write code and incorporate information that is unbiased and non-discriminatory. Failure to do that leads to AI algorithms that are unfair and unjust.

Of course, that often is not the case. Reflecting the importance of education for life outcomes, parents, teachers, and school administrators fight over the importance of different factors. Should students always be assigned to their neighborhood school or should other criteria override that consideration? As an illustration, in a city with widespread racial segregation and economic inequalities by neighborhood, elevating neighborhood school assignments can exacerbate inequality and racial segregation. For these reasons, software designers have to balance competing interests and reach intelligent decisions that reflect values important in that particular community.

Making these kinds of decisions increasingly falls to computer programmers. They must build intelligent algorithms that compile decisions based on a number of different considerations. That can include basic principles such as efficiency, equity, justice, and effectiveness. Figuring out how to reconcile conflicting values is one of the most important challenges facing AI designers. It is vital that they write code and incorporate information that is unbiased and non-discriminatory. Failure to do that leads to AI algorithms that are unfair and unjust.

The last quality that marks AI systems is the ability to learn and adapt as they compile information and make decisions. Effective artificial intelligence must adjust as circumstances or conditions shift. This may involve alterations in financial situations, road conditions, environmental considerations, or military circumstances. AI must integrate these changes in its algorithms and make decisions on how to adapt to the new possibilities.

One can illustrate these issues most dramatically in the transportation area. Autonomous vehicles can use machine-to-machine communications to alert other cars on the road about upcoming congestion, potholes, highway construction, or other possible traffic impediments. Vehicles can take advantage of the experience of other vehicles on the road, without human involvement, and the entire corpus of their achieved experience is immediately and fully transferable to other similarly configured vehicles. Their advanced algorithms, sensors, and cameras incorporate experience in current operations, and use dashboards and visual displays to present information in real time so human drivers are able to make sense of ongoing traffic and vehicular conditions.

A similar logic applies to AI devised for scheduling appointments. There are personal digital assistants that can ascertain a persons preferences and respond to email requests for personal appointments in a dynamic manner. Without any human intervention, a digital assistant can make appointments, adjust schedules, and communicate those preferences to other individuals. Building adaptable systems that learn as they go has the potential of improving effectiveness and efficiency. These kinds of algorithms can handle complex tasks and make judgments that replicate or exceed what a human could do. But making sure they learn in ways that are fair and just is a high priority for system designers.

In short, there have been extraordinary advances in recent years in the ability of AI systems to incorporate intentionality, intelligence, and adaptability in their algorithms. Rather than being mechanistic or deterministic in how the machines operate, AI software learns as it goes along and incorporates real-world experience in its decisionmaking. In this way, it enhances human performance and augments peoples capabilities.

Of course, these advances also make people nervous about doomsday scenarios sensationalized by movie-makers. Situations where AI-powered robots take over from humans or weaken basic values frighten people and lead them to wonder whether AI is making a useful contribution or runs the risk of endangering the essence of humanity.

With the appropriate safeguards,countries can move forward and gain the benefits of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies without sacrificing the important qualities that define humanity.

There is no easy answer to that question, but system designers must incorporate important ethical values in algorithms to make sure they correspond to human concerns and learn and adapt in ways that are consistent with community values. This is the reason it is important to ensure that AI ethics are taken seriously and permeate societal decisions. In order to maximize positive outcomes, organizations should hire ethicists who work with corporate decisionmakers and software developers, have a code of AI ethics that lays out how various issues will be handled, organize an AI review board that regularly addresses corporate ethical questions, have AI audit trails that show how various coding decisions have been made, implement AI training programs so staff operationalizes ethical considerations in their daily work, and provide a means for remediation when AI solutions inflict harm or damages on people or organizations.

Through these kinds of safeguards, societies will increase the odds that AI systems are intentional, intelligent, and adaptable while still conforming to basic human values. In that way, countries can move forward and gain the benefits of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies without sacrificing the important qualities that define humanity.

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What is artificial intelligence? - Brookings

Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence – Future of …

Many AI researchers roll their eyes when seeing this headline:Stephen Hawking warns that rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind. And as many havelost count of how many similar articles theyveseen.Typically, these articles are accompanied by an evil-looking robot carrying a weapon, and they suggest we should worry about robots rising up and killing us because theyve become conscious and/or evil.On a lighter note, such articles are actually rather impressive, because they succinctly summarize the scenario that AI researchers dontworry about. That scenario combines as many as three separate misconceptions: concern about consciousness, evil, androbots.

If you drive down the road, you have a subjective experience of colors, sounds, etc. But does a self-driving car have a subjective experience? Does it feel like anything at all to be a self-driving car?Although this mystery of consciousness is interesting in its own right, its irrelevant to AI risk. If you get struck by a driverless car, it makes no difference to you whether it subjectively feels conscious. In the same way, what will affect us humans is what superintelligent AIdoes, not how it subjectively feels.

The fear of machines turning evil is another red herring. The real worry isnt malevolence, but competence. A superintelligent AI is by definition very good at attaining its goals, whatever they may be, so we need to ensure that its goals are aligned with ours. Humans dont generally hate ants, but were more intelligent than they are so if we want to build a hydroelectric dam and theres an anthill there, too bad for the ants. The beneficial-AI movement wants to avoid placing humanity in the position of those ants.

The consciousness misconception is related to the myth that machines cant have goals.Machines can obviously have goals in the narrow sense of exhibiting goal-oriented behavior: the behavior of a heat-seeking missile is most economically explained as a goal to hit a target.If you feel threatened by a machine whose goals are misaligned with yours, then it is precisely its goals in this narrow sense that troubles you, not whether the machine is conscious and experiences a sense of purpose.If that heat-seeking missile were chasing you, you probably wouldnt exclaim: Im not worried, because machines cant have goals!

I sympathize with Rodney Brooks and other robotics pioneers who feel unfairly demonized by scaremongering tabloids,because some journalists seem obsessively fixated on robots and adorn many of their articles with evil-looking metal monsters with red shiny eyes. In fact, the main concern of the beneficial-AI movement isnt with robots but with intelligence itself: specifically, intelligence whose goals are misaligned with ours. To cause us trouble, such misaligned superhuman intelligence needs no robotic body, merely an internet connection this may enable outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate many humans to unwittingly do its bidding.

The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines cant control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we are stronger, but because we are smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, its possible that we might also cede control.

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Top 5 things to know about the state of artificial intelligence – TechRepublic

Artificial intelligence continues to grow rapidly. Tom Merritt breaks down the five things you need to know about AI, according to a report from Stanford University.

Every year the Human-Centered Artificial Institute at Stanford puts together the Artificial Intelligence Index Report, relying on experts from around the discipline, including folks at Harvard, Google Open AI, and more, to try to pin down where we are with artificial intelligence (AI). You should definitely read all 290 pages, but for now here are five things to know about the state of AI.

SEE: Artificial intelligence ethics policy (TechRepublic Premium)

That's just where the work is getting done and where the money flows. As far as results, AI seems to be helping make software work a little better. But, most of your human skills are just getting help from the competition, not being replaced for now.

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Top 5 things to know about the state of artificial intelligence - TechRepublic