What is artificial intelligence?

Stellar Fund
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

The definition of artificial intelligence quoted in the preamble, given by John McCarthy in 1956 at a conference at Dartmouth University, is not directly related to the understanding of intelligence in humans. According to McCarthy, AI researchers are free to use methods that are not observed in humans, if this is necessary to solve specific problems.

Explaining his definition, John McCarthy points out: “The problem is that until we can not in general determine which computing procedures we want to call intellectual. We understand some mechanisms of intelligence and do not understand the rest. Therefore, the intellect within this science is understood only as the computational component of the ability to achieve goals in the world. “

At the same time, there is a point of view according to which intellect can only be a biological phenomenon.

As the chairman of the Petersburg branch of the Russian Association of Artificial Intelligence TA Gavrilova points out, in English the phrase artificial intelligence does not have that slightly fantastic anthropomorphic coloring that it acquired in a rather unsuccessful Russian translation. The word intelligence means “the ability to reason intelligently” and not “intellect”, for which there is an English analog intellect.

Participants of the Russian Association of Artificial Intelligence give the following definitions of artificial intelligence:

The scientific direction, within which problems of hardware or software modeling of those kinds of human activity that are traditionally considered intellectual are put and are being solved. The property of intellectual systems to perform functions (creative), which are traditionally considered the prerogative of man. At the same time, an intellectual system is a technical or software system capable of solving problems traditionally considered creative, belonging to a particular subject area, knowledge of which is stored in the memory of such a system.

The structure of the intellectual system includes three main blocks — knowledge base, solver and intelligent interface, allowing to communicate with the computer without special programs for data entry. Science called “Artificial Intelligence” is included in the complex of computer science, and the technologies created on its basis to information technologies. The task of this science is the reconstruction with the help of computer systems and other artificial devices of reasonable reasoning and actions.

One of the particular definitions of intelligence common to man and the “machine” can be formulated as follows: “Intelligence is the ability of the system to create programs (primarily heuristic) in the course of self-learning to solve problems of a certain complexity class and solve these problems.”

Stellar Fund

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