Artificial Intelligence (AI)
"The question of whether computers can think
is like the question of whether submarines can swim."
Edsger W. Dijkstra
1930 - 2002
AI is a branch of computer science that studies how to endow computers with capabilities of human intelligence. The term was constructed by John McCarthy in 1955 in his Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project On Artificial Intelligence. McCarthy tried to make AI a new field between cybernetics and automation. His definition of AI was: "making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving".
AI may be more or less deriving from human psychological
models as studied by cognitive psychology.
(There is some circularity here because cognitive psychologists may also derive
models of human psychology from computer science).
Two major paradigms in AI are symbolic AI (or classical AI) and connectionism. Symbolic AI is the branch of artificial intelligence research that concerns itself with attempting to explicitly represent human knowledge in a declarative form (i.e. facts and rules).
A differentiation has been made between "strong AI" and "weak AI":
"Strong AI [or hard AI] is a
hypothetical form of artificial intelligence that can truly reason and solve
problems; a strong AI is said to be sentient, or self-aware, but may or may not
exhibit human-like thought processes. " (Wikipedia, 2006).
"In contrast to strong AI, weak AI [or soft AI] refers to the use of software to study or accomplish specific problem solving or reasoning tasks that do not encompass (or in some cases, are completely outside of) the full range of human cognitive abilities. An example of weak AI software would be a chess program such as Deep Blue. Unlike strong AI, a weak AI does not achieve self-awareness or demonstrate a wide range of human-level cognitive abilities, and is merely an (arguably) intelligent, more specific problem-solver." (Wikipedia, 2006).
Literature:
Amsler, R. A. (1992). Literature, AI. Vol. 1, pp. 844-850 in:
Encyclopedia of
Artificial Intelligence. Vol. I-II. Ed. by Stuart C. Shapiro. New York: John
Wiley & Sons.
Boden, M. A. (1988). Artificial Intelligence. IN: a lexikon of
psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Ed. by J. Kuper. London, (Pp.
31-34).
Fischler, M. & Firschein, O. (1987). The Eye, The Brain, and the Computer. Wokingham: Addison-Wesley Publ. Co.
Reingold, E. & Nightingale, J. (1999). PSY371. Artificial Intelligence Tutorial Review. http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~reingold/courses/ai/ai.html
Shapiro, S. C. (1992). Artificial intelligence. Vol. 1, pp. 54-57 in: Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence. Vol. I-II. Ed. by Stuart C. Shapiro. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia. (2006). Strong AI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI
Winograd, T. & Flores, F. (1987). Understanding Computers and Cognition. A new approach
to design. Wokingham, England: Addison-Wesley Publ. Co.
See also: Cognitive paradigm;
Expert system;
Information science, related
fields; Neural networks
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 15-05-2006