WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?

• It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence.

WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?

• Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world. Varying kinds and degrees of intelligence occur in people, many animals and some machines.

APPLICATIONS OF AI:

game playing
You can buy machines that can play master level chess for a few hundred dollars. There is some AI in them, but they play well against people mainly through brute force computation--looking at hundreds of thousands of positions.

speech recognition
In the 1990s, computer speech recognition reached a practical level for limited purposes. It is quite convenient. It is possible to instruct some computers using speech, most users have gone back to the keyboard and the mouse as still more convenient.
understanding natural language
Just getting a sequence of words into a computer is not enough. Parsing sentences is not enough either. The computer has to be provided with an understanding of the domain the text is about, and this is presently possible only for very limited domains.
computer vision
The world is composed of three-dimensional objects, but the inputs to the human eye and computers' TV cameras are two dimensional. Some useful programs can work solely in two dimensions, but full computer vision requires partial three-dimensional information that is not just a set of two-dimensional views.

expert systems
A ``knowledge engineer'' interviews experts in a certain domain and tries to embody their knowledge in a computer program for carrying out some task. One of the first expert systems was MYCIN in 1974, which diagnosed bacterial infections of the blood and suggested treatments. It did better than medical students or practicing doctors, provided its limitations were observed.