What is A.I ?
A No-fuss, No-code Quick Guide
When I was beginning to learn about the field of Artificial Intelligence I started out the same way as everyone does. Scavenge through hundreds of article available online and devour as much information as I could on this topic. While doing so I came across many articles, tutorials , cheat sheets etc. where the terms such as “Artificial Intelligence”, “Machine Learning” and “Data Science” interchangeably used and this lead me to believe that all the three terms/fields of study are one and the same thing which of-course as many of you must be knowing are not the same and it took me quite a long time to figure this out (Well, I am a slow learner. So what?). With this article I hope that I can clear the confusion around these terms and help the non-technical readers among you to better explore the field of Artificial Intelligence without getting lost in all the technical jargons and without getting confused with all the catchy phrases and terms in this field of technology.
So, what is Artificial Intelligence exactly? Well I will try to explain this with a real world example and my friend “Jack” has agreed to help me out in laying out a real world case study on this topic.
Meet Jack
Ahmm! Ok, he is a bit eccentric but he agreed to provide his expertise for this article for free. So, you see he is a very nice guy.
As you can see he is a robot and a somewhat intelligent one. Now you can say that the only thing you see him doing is making facial expressions and speaking dumb stuffs and because of this he doesn’t appear to be that intelligent. BUT! just for a moment think it from a different angle, Jack is an artificial being as he is not human, he doesn’t have natural emotion like you and me. So, in order to show us those emotions and speak some words, he actually needs to mimic words, emotions, hand gestures to match with the words he is speaking and the facial expressions he is making. In other words he is “Artificially Synthesizing” all those things.
In order to “Synthesize” all those things the computer which is inside Jack should be coded to do all those things and the code itself needs to be “intelligent” enough to react to the situation, surroundings and interactions with the surroundings.
How Jack pulls off all these stuffs?
This is actually a nice question. Humans and other animals have different sensory organs to assess their surroundings and a brain capable enough to process all these input data and make sense out of it. For example when your friend tells you a joke, your brain takes in all those audio as input and then processes it so that you can make sense out of it. Then when you find it funny enough, you burst into a laughter or at least you pretend to find it funny.
But my friend Jack does not have such sensory organs or a brain, at least not a real brain. Jack’s “brain” is actually a computer which runs some intelligent code which fall under a group of specialized code known as “Machine Learning Algorithms” which we will touch upon in upcoming articles. Jack’s "brain" takes in information from an array of different sensors which interact with the environment and sends in those data to the code which in turn processes them in order to makes sense of it.
Since Jack can "sense" his environment and process the data gathered from his environment and then simulate some emotions and responses to all these external stimulus, we can say that Jack actually synthesizes "Intelligence" and thus belongs to a group of machines which are known as “Artificial Intelligence”.
Ok! Nice Story. But What the heck is Artificial Intelligence?
Well simply put any kind of intelligence that is not real but is artificially synthesized is termed as "Artificial Intelligence".
Duh! I thought you would be explaining in detail!
Well this is it. This is the simplest possible description of Artificial Intelligence. It’s an umbrella term to describe machines which are able to simulate some form of intelligence artificially through software code and this word is also used to describe the field of study of developing such machines.
Conclusion
Artificial Intelligence is not just another buzzword or hype term, it’s a very fascinating technology and an entire field of study in itself and to truly understand it’s importance and implementation the confusion around it should be cleared and in order to do that, a larger audience needs to get involved in understanding this technology. Towards this effort I am trying to put together some articles which can drop the technical jargons in favour of making the topic of Artificial Intelligence easier to understand and applicable to a wider audience.
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P.S — There are two good books that I have read which tries to explain Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in a very simple and practical way and I would like to recommend these books to anyone who is interested to explore more about machine learning and artificial intelligence and do not want to go through all the technicalities and mathematics which is usually associated with this topic. The two books are as mentioned below→
- Prediction Machine by Ajay Agrawal — Available here
- Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom — Available here
