Artificial Intelligence For Dummies

Chapter 3

Considering the Use of Algorithms

IN THIS CHAPTER

Discovering the role of algorithms in AI

Winning games with state-space search and minmax

Analyzing how expert systems work

Seeing that machine learning and deep learning are part of AI

Data is a game changer in AI. Recent advances in AI hint that for some problems, choosing the right amount of data is more important than the right algorithm. For instance, in 2001, two researchers from Microsoft, Banko and Brill, in their memorable paper “Scaling to Very Very Large Corpora for Natural Language Disambiguation” (http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P01-1005) demonstrated that if you want a computer to create a model of a language, you don’t need the smartest algorithm in town. After throwing more than one billion words within context at the problem, any algorithms will start performing incredibly well. This chapter helps you understand the relationship between algorithms and the data used to make them perform useful work.

However, no matter how much data you have, you still need an algorithm to make it useful. In addition, you ...