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?”
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