Artificial Intelligence in a nutshell

Ever tried the voice recognition feature in your mobile or computer? Most of us have!! And I am sure most of you were amused to see how a machine could recognize the language we speak. All this is possible due to Artificial Intelligence and this is a small speck of the enormous potential AI and its application hold with in.

Artificial Intelligence is a branch of computer science that aims at making machines or software programs that exhibit intelligent behavior like human beings i.e. a machine can perceive their surroundings, analyze and react in the best possible way. The AI involves various other fields like Cognitive Science, Mathematical Logic, computational science to name a few.

The history of artificial intelligence can be traced to 1950 when Alan Turing proposed the Turing test as a measure of machine intelligence. The Turing test   Prof. John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence at the conference on the campus of Dartmouth College in summer of 1956.Over the time AI has been divided into:

Strong AI :  Strong AI (Very often called as ‘true AI’) refers to AI that inculcates intelligence in the machine that matches or exceeds human intelligence. This has still not come in to existence but finds a place in many of the sci-fi movies like Matrix, Terminator etc.

Weak AI : Weak AI refers to AI that enables machines to only mimic humans based on their programming. This kind of AI just simulates the human thoughts and actions that they are programmed to. AI. The true AI features like independent reasoning, to learn freely and adapt are absent. All current form of AI is weak.

There are many areas in which weak AI already inhabits today’s world and in many cases we don’t even realize that we use Artificial Intelligence. Lets see some of such applications:

• The self-parking technology in cars is based on AI.
• AI is used in monitoring frauds in Banks.
• The voice recognition in mobile phones was made possible using AI.
• The intelligent homes comprising of temperature, passive infrared, electricity and light sensors are AI based.
• Unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous submersibles, unmanned surveillance in shallow water used in Military also involve AI.
• The Computer chess built on AI defeated the world Champion Garry Kasparov in a game.

The dream of making machines that are ‘Truly AI’ does not seem impossible. Companies like Google are aiming at making search engine fully artificially intelligent. In future we will have a search engine that will not be based on ‘just the words we type in without the search engine understanding the meaning’, instead it will exactly understand what we want.