Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of Science which deals with helping machines finding solutions to complex problems in a more human-like fashion. This generally involves borrowing characteristics from human intelligence, and applying them as algorithms in a computer friendly way. A more or less flexible or efficient approach can be taken depending on the requirements established, which influences how artificial the intelligent behaviour appears. AI is generally associated with Computer Science, but it has many important links with other fields such as Maths, Psychology, Cognition, Biology and Philosophy, among many others. Our ability to combine knowledge from all these fields will ultimately benefit our progress in the quest of creating an intelligent artificial being. AI is one of the newest disciplines. It was formally initiated in 1956, when the name was coined, although at that point work had been under way for about five years. However, the study of intelligence is one of the oldest disciplines. For over 2000 years, philosophers have tried to understand how seeing, learning, remembering, and reasoning could, or should, be done. The advent of usable computers in the early 1950s turned the learned but armchair speculation concerning these mental faculties into a real experimental and theoretical discipline. Many felt that the new ``Electronic Super-Brains'' had unlimited potential for intelligence. ``Faster Than Einstein'' was a typical headline. But as well as providing a vehicle for creating artificially intelligent entities, the computer provides a tool for testing theories of intelligence, and many theories failed to withstand the test. AI has turned out to be more difficult than many at first imagined, and modern ideas are much richer, more subtle, and more interesting as a result. AI currently encompasses a huge variety of subfields, from general-purpose areas such as perception and logical reasoning, to specific tasks such as playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, writing poetry, and diagnosing diseases. Often, scientists in other fields move gradually into artificial intelligence, where they find the tools and vocabulary to systematize and automate the intellectual tasks on which they have been working all their lives. Similarly, workers in AI can choose to apply their methods to any area of human intellectual endeavour. In this sense, it is truly a universal field.
