Textbook of AI

Also known as: AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the broad field of computer science concerned with building machines capable of performing tasks that would, if done by a human, be said to require intelligence. The term was coined at the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, where John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon convened to study "how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves."

Russell and Norvig organise AI definitions along two axes: thinking versus acting, and human-like versus rational. This gives four schools: systems that think like humans, think rationally, act like humans, or act rationally. The "acting rationally" quadrant dominates contemporary research, defining an agent as an entity that perceives its environment through sensors and acts upon it through actuators in order to maximise some measure of performance.

AI is not a single technology but a family of techniques, theories and aspirations. It encompasses symbolic approaches (logic, search, expert systems), statistical machine learning (regression, SVMs, random forests), deep learning (neural networks), and increasingly hybrid systems. The "AI effect" describes the tendency of the field's boundary to recede: once a problem is solved—chess, OCR, spell checking—it stops being called AI and becomes just software.