Artificial Intelligence Programming with Python

CHAPTER 1Introduction to AI

“There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence machine by 2035.”

—Gray Scott (American futurist)

1. 1.1 What Is AI?
2. 1.2 The History of AI
3. 1.3 AI Hypes and AI Winters
4. 1.4 The Types of AI
5. 1.5 Edge AI and Cloud AI
6. 1.6 Key Moments of AI
7. 1.7 The State of AI
8. 1.8 AI Resources
9. 1.9 Summary
10. 1.10 Chapter Review Questions

1.1 What Is AI?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no doubt one of the hottest buzzwords right now. It is in the news all the time. So, what is AI, and why is it important? When you talk about AI, the image that probably pops into most people's heads is of a human-like robot that can do complicated, clever things, as shown in Figure 1.1. AI is actually more than that.

AI is an area of computer science that aims to make machines do intelligent things, that is, learn and solve problems, similar to the natural intelligence of humans and animals. In AI, an intelligent agent receives information from the environment, performs computations to decide what action to take in order to achieve the goal, and takes actions autonomously. AI can improve its performance with learning.

For more information, see the John McCarthy's 2004 paper titled, “What Is Artificial Intelligence?”

https://homes.di.unimi.it/borghese/Teaching/AdvancedIntelligentSystems/Old/IntelligentSystems_2008_2009/Old/IntelligentSystems_2005_2006/Documents/Symbolic/04_McCarthy_whatisai.pdf

Figure 1.1: The common perception of AI

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