Logic for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence

Chapter 7

Artificial Intelligence

Intelligence is by essence unintelligible.

David Hume (1711-1776)

Although we often believe that the philosopher is right, we cannot deny that scientific progress, in particular in biology, has permitted us to cast a light on the following problems: studying intelligence, its partial simulation on machines, what can be formalized (with the current state of formal tools), appreciating its limits, better identify where the problems are important, and so on.

Furthermore, note that from a practical point of view, we need more and more intelligent tools (whatever the reasonable and perhaps informal characterization of “intelligence” we adopt).

7.1. Intelligent systems: AI

To begin to grasp the topic, we recall the etymology of (natural) intelligence¹ :

in French:

Intelligence: 12th Century “understanding”, 15th Century “communication between people who understand each other”.

in English:

Intelligent: 16th Century, from the Latin words intellegere, ligere lit. choose among, formed on INTER + legere gather, choose.

In other words, choose among (which implicitly seems to admit the importance of handling non-determinism).

As far as its study and modeling is concerned, for a long time, mathematics has been used to study problems that arise in natural science, in particular on the behavior of the brain and the nervous system. Conversely, important developments in different topics of mathematics have been motivated by these problems. All this happened before ...