What is Artificial Intelligence?

To understand artificial intelligence, it is important to develop an understanding of Human intelligence first. Human intelligence is defined as the cognitive abilities to learn, understand, reason, plan, make decisions, solve problems and innovate. Artificial intelligence may be defined as non-human cognitive abilities similar to those of humans.

Are there different types of AI?

Yes, generally speaking we can categorize the artificial intelligence into the following 3 different levels:

Artificial Narrow Intelligence where the focus is on successful accomplishment of a narrow task.

Artificial General Intelligence where the artificially constructed intelligence is capable of achieving human level of cognitive abilities.

Artificial Super Intelligence where the artificial intelligence is capable of achieving cognitive abilities surpassing that of humans.

What is Machine Learning? [read more]

Machine learning refers to a range of computer algorithms that are improved through experience generally referred to as training data. Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence.

What are Artificial Neural Networks? [read more]

Artificial Neural Networks are computing systems composed of network of artificial neural cells. Computational Learning algorithms are used to adjust the parameter of these networks and hence optimize their performance for the targeted tasks. Artificial Neural Networks are one type of the computing systems within Machine Learning.

What is Natural Language Processing? [read more]

Natural language processing is a subfield of artificial intelligence where computing algorithms are used to process natural language data including natural language understanding and natural language generation.

What are the applications of AI?

Applications of artificial narrow intelligence covers a wide range including autonomous vehicles, medical diagnosis, computer games, search engines, virtual assistants, and recommendation engines.

Timeline of Artificial Intelligence

The important events in the history of artificial intelligence span a range of topics from research into understanding of neural cells, research into rule based intelligent systems to recent successes in various applications.

2020 Deepmind’s Agent57 achieves scores above human baseline in all 57 Atari 2600 games.

2019 AlphaStar masters the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II

2016 AlphaGo’s 4-1 victory over legendary go player Mr Lee Sedol.

2011 IBM’s Watson wins against two biggest all time champions of Jeopardy.

2005 Stanford University’s Stanley wins DARPA Grand Challenge.

1997 IBM’s Deep Blue defeates Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

1991 DARPA introduced the AI program Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool (DART).

1988 IBM’s Thomas J. Watson research center reintroduced statistical machine translation.

1983 US government introduces Strategic Computing Initiative in response to Japan’s FGCS.

1982 Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry introduces Fifth Generation Computer Systems.

1980 Digital Equipment Corporation develops R1, the first successful commercial expert system.

1973 Publication of Lighthill Report which becomes a basis for drastic cuts to AI research by British government.

1969 The first expert systems are developed in DENDRAL at Stanford University.

1966 The first natural language processing computer program ELIZA is created at MIT AI Lab.

1959 Arthur Samuel popularizes the term machine learning while at IBM.

1958 John McCarthy develops the AI programming language Lisp and publishes the paper Programs with Common Sense.

1956 John McCarthy coins the term Artificial Intelligence at Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.

1956 Logic Theorist, the first automated reasoning program was engineered by Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and Cliff Shaw.

1955 Arthur Samuel develops a self learning checker program.

1954 The Georgetown-IBM experiment automatically translates 60 carefully selected Russian sentences into English.

1951 SNARC Maze Solver, the first neural network computer, is engineered by Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds.

1950 Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence.

1943 Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts publish A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity, including the first mathematic model for building a neural network.

1942 Isaac Asimov introduces the three laws of robotics.