Artificial intelligence

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"AI" redirects here. For other uses, see AI (disambiguation) and Artificial intelligence
(disambiguation).

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Major goals

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Approaches

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Applications

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Philosophy

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History

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Glossary

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Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the capability of computational systems to perform
tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning,
problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of research in computer
science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines
to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that
maximize their chances of achieving defined goals.[1] Such machines may be called AIs.

High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google

Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix); virtual
assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa); autonomous
vehicles (e.g., Waymo); generative and creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT and AI art);
and superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go). However,
many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into
general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes
useful enough and common enough it's not labeled AI anymore."[2][3]

Various subfields of AI research are centered around particular goals and the use of
particular tools. The traditional goals of AI research include reasoning, knowledge
representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception, and
support for robotics.[a] General intelligence—the ability to complete any task performed
by a human on an at least equal level—is among the field's long-term goals.[4] To reach
these goals, AI researchers have adapted and integrated a wide range of techniques,
including search and mathematical optimization, formal logic, artificial neural networks,
and methods based on statistics, operations research, and economics.[b] AI also draws
upon psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, and other fields.[5]

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956,[6] and the field went
through multiple cycles of optimism throughout its history,[7][8] followed by periods of
disappointment and loss of funding, known as AI winters.[9][10] Funding and interest vastly
increased after 2012 when deep learning outperformed previous AI techniques.[11] This
growth accelerated further after 2017 with the transformer architecture,[12] and by the
early 2020s many billions of dollars were being invested in AI and the field experienced
rapid ongoing progress in what has become known as the AI boom. The emergence of
advanced generative AI in the midst of the AI boom and its ability to create and modify
content exposed several unintended consequences and harms in the present and
raised concerns about the risks of AI and its long-term effects in the future, prompting
discussions about regulatory policies to ensure the safety and benefits of the
technology.

Goals
The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken into
subproblems. These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers expect an
intelligent system to display. The traits described below have received the most
attention and cover the scope of AI research.[a]

Reasoning and problem-solving

Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that
humans use when they solve puzzles or make logical deductions.[13] By the late 1980s
and 1990s, methods were developed for dealing with uncertain or incomplete
information, employing concepts from probability and economics.[14]

Many of these algorithms are insufficient for solving large reasoning problems because
they experience a "combinatorial explosion": They become exponentially slower as the
problems grow.[15] Even humans rarely use the step-by-step deduction that early AI
research could model. They solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive judgments.
[16]
Accurate and efficient reasoning is an unsolved problem.

Knowledge representation
ontlogy represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between
those concepts.
Knowledge representation and knowledge engineering[17] allow AI programs to answer
questions intelligently and make deductions about real-world facts. Formal knowledge
representations are used in content-based indexing and retrieval,[18] scene interpretation,
[19]
clinical decision support,[20] knowledge discovery (mining "interesting" and actionable
inferences from large databases),[21] and other areas.[22]

A knowledge base is a body of knowledge represented in a form that can be used by a

program. An ontology is the set of objects, relations, concepts, and properties used by a
particular domain of knowledge.[23] Knowledge bases need to represent things such as
objects, properties, categories, and relations between objects;[24] situations, events,
states, and time;[25] causes and effects;[26] knowledge about knowledge (what we know
about what other people know);[27] default reasoning (things that humans assume are
true until they are told differently and will remain true even when other facts are
changing);[28] and many other aspects and domains of knowledge.

Among the most difficult problems in knowledge representation are the breadth of
commonsense knowledge (the set of atomic facts that the average person knows is
enormous);[29] and the sub-symbolic form of most commonsense knowledge (much of
what people know is not represented as "facts" or "statements" that they could express
verbally).[16] There is also the difficulty of knowledge acquisition, the problem of obtaining
knowledge for AI applications.[c]

Planning and decision-making

An "agent" is anything that perceives and takes actions in the world. A rational
agent has goals or preferences and takes actions to make them happen.[d]
[32]
In automated planning, the agent has a specific goal.[33] In automated decision-
making, the agent has preferences—there are some situations it would prefer to be in,
and some situations it is trying to avoid. The decision-making agent assigns a number
to each situation (called the "utility") that measures how much the agent prefers it. For
each possible action, it can calculate the "expected utility": the utility of all possible
outcomes of the action, weighted by the probability that the outcome will occur. It can
then choose the action with the maximum expected utility.[34]
In classical planning, the agent knows exactly what the effect of any action will be.[35] In
most real-world problems, however, the agent may not be certain about the situation
they are in (it is "unknown" or "unobservable") and it may not know for certain what will
happen after each possible action (it is not "deterministic"). It must choose an action by
making a probabilistic guess and then reassess the situation to see if the action worked.
[36]

In some problems, the agent's preferences may be uncertain, especially if there are
other agents or humans involved. These can be learned (e.g., with inverse
reinforcement learning), or the agent can seek information to improve its preferences.
[37]
Information value theory can be used to weigh the value of exploratory or
experimental actions.[38] The space of possible future actions and situations is
typically intractably large, so the agents must take actions and evaluate situations while
being uncertain of what the outcome will be.

A Markov decision process has a transition model that describes the probability that a
particular action will change the state in a particular way and a reward function that
supplies the utility of each state and the cost of each action. A policy associates a
decision with each possible state. The policy could be calculated (e.g., by iteration),
be heuristic, or it can be learned.[39]

Game theory describes the rational behavior of multiple interacting agents and is used
in AI programs that make decisions that involve other agents.[40]