Artificial Intelligence/Definition

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Over the past few years, you might have come across the term artificial intelligence and have imagined it to be a vivid personification of extra-terrestrial beings or robots. But, what is artificial intelligence in fact? In this section, we will explore the meaning and semantics of the term artificial intelligence.

[edit] What is artificial intelligence, anyway?

Artificial intelligence is the search for a way to map intelligence into mechanical hardware and enable a structure into that system to formalize thought. No formal definition, as yet, is available for as to what artificial intelligence actually is. Over the course of this section, we will try to formulate a working definition, reasoning and articulating facts and preferences of various other authors and practitioners of the field. To start with, we would think of the word artificial and intelligence as main sources of inspiration and come up with a brief description of the same as follows:

Artificial Intelligence is the study of human intelligence such that it can be replicated artificially.

With our first set of formal declaration of the concept, we tread gradually through different semantics of it and try to explore a much broader definition for AI. In their book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, authors Russell and Norvig tried to establish a clear classification of the definition of the field into distinct categories based on working definitions from other authors commenting on AI. The demarcation of concepts holds true to these clauses for systems that:

• Think and act like humans
• Think and act rationally

So, one would be tempted to improve upon the definition given above to include these facts into perspective such that the definition that we end up with says that:

Artificial Intelligence is the study of human intelligence and actions replicated artificially, such that the resultant bears to its design a reasonable level of rationality.