AI: Introduction

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence is not only one of the most advanced and complex area of interest in today's world, but it is also one of the most unique. For nearly the past half-century, the field of AI has been of use, or of potential use, to nearly every field of study existant. This is primarily because most AI concentrates on different ways of going about doing something; it proposes different algorithms for carrying out tasks, which gives different and new perspectives not only on how the task should be completed, but on the nature of the task itself.

Today artificial intelligence is used for a wide variety of things. Consumerism has sparked the use of artificial intelligence in a field of AI called data mining. This includes the production of intelligent agents which are capable of natural language processing (that is, "understanding" written sentences) and are able to scour huge sources of information such as the World Wide Web and come up with significant data, such as finding the best price for a specific kind of product. Some political theorists believe that artificial intelligence can be used to create virtual situations in which the computer is able to decide what the best and most rational course of action is, based upon environmental variables. Computer games use artificial intelligence to predict what the player might do and respond accordingly to his or her actions. Psychologists are concerned about the creation an "Eliza-like" AI program--a program which is a "virtual psychologist" and tries to help people solve their problems through natural language processing and the use of knowledge representation (i.e., how information and ideas are stored, manipulated, and interpreted in AI). Yet another field of AI is that of computer vision, or the ability for a computer to recognize and understand images as well as the human mind can, through techniques of image processing and pattern recognition.

From just these examples, it is obvious to see that the nature of artificial intelligence is so complex and its uses are so broad that explaining all of its aspects would take an enormous amount of time (and it would probably fry your brain). For this reason, this web project has been limited to examining artificial intelligence from a biological and a philosophical context, with some emphasis on practical applications. In general, the web site is structured as follows:

Genetic Algorithms. This section contains information about how the biological phenonmena of darwinistic survival, reproduction, and stochastic mutation can be simulated in digital technology for a variety of practical applications. Genetic programming and the recent development of the Field Programmable Gate Array will also be discussed.
Artificial Life. This section tells you about how life itself is being synthesized in the digital medium to provide us with a better insight on what life is and what its properites are. It also discusses and contemplates the long-asked question which has been of much debate since the days of Alan Turing: can machines possess self-consciousness and be considered living beings?
Timeline. This section is a brief timeline of the history of artificial intelligence, starting from when Karel Capek first coined the term 'robot' in 1927.

Have fun enjoying these pages, and we hope you learn something!