The Artificial Intelligence is a part of computer science concerned with designing intelligent computer computer systems that exhibit intelligent characteristics expressed by human behavior like understanding language, learning, reasoning, solving problems etc. The important definitions of AI can be grouped in two dimensions:
- "The Machines with mind"
- "The systems that think and act like humans"
(i.e the computer systems capable of carrying out activities that require intelligence and human thinking processes like learning, decision making, problem solving etc)
- "The systems that think and act rationally"
- "The systems with intelligent agents"
- "The study of mental faculties through the use of computational models"
(i.e Many believe that insights in to the nature of mind can be gained by studying AI programs)There are two schools of thoughts as far as the approaches to AI are considered. One is centered around humans and other centered around rationality. The human-centered approach is an empirical science involving hypothesis but needs experimental confirmation. The performance of such systems are expressed in terms of fidelity to human performance. The rationalist approach uses the knowledge of mathematics and engineering. The performance of rationalist systems is measured against the ideal concept of intelligence.
It is Alan Turing who first proposed theory of computation. He proposed for the possibility of a computational machine that could behave in a way that could be perceived as intelligent. He developed a simple, universal and non numeric computing model (Turing machine) which is capable of computing any computable function. Alan Turing (1936) is called the father of AI.
