Characterizations of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is a typical science to describe, because it has fuzzy borders with, psychology, computer science, mathematics, philosophy, statistics, physics, biology and many other disciplines. It is characterized in many ways, some of which are given below. I'll use these categorizations to introduce several important issues in Artificial Intelligence.
Produce machines which exhibit intelligent behavior.
In this sense Machines could simply be personal computers, or it could be robots with embedded systems, or a mixture of both of this. Why would we want to build intelligent systems? Only One answer appeals to the reasons why we use computers in general: to complete tasks which, if we did them by hand would be error prone. For an instance how many of us would not use our calculator if essential to multiply two six digit numbers together? If we extent this up to more intelligent tasks, then it might be possible to use computers to do some complicated things reliably. This reliability can be useful if the task is beyond the limitation of the brain, or when human perception is counter-constructive, likewise in the Monty Hall problem described the below, which many people - some of whom call themselves great mathematicians - get wrong.
Another reason we ought to want to build intelligent machines is to make enable us to do things we couldn't do previous to. A large part of science is dependent on the use of computers already, and more intelligent applications are increasingly being employed. Of course, the efficiency for intelligent software to increase our abilities is not limited to science and people are working on AI programs that can have a creative input to human activities likewise composing, painting and writing.