What is Artificial Intelligence?

This is the first blog in a series of blogs that pertain to the field of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence was a term first coined by Professor John McCarthy in 1956. But what is artificial intelligence? There are many definitions to this great question, and one of my favorites actually happens to be from John McCarthy himself. McCarthy states that "[Artificial Intelligence] is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable."

There are many different fields and aspects of artificial intelligence. There is no one problem, there is no one field, that can summarize what artificial intelligence actually is. Artificial intelligence is a culmination of many different fields that have so many different questions. The disciplines of Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, Linguistics, Biology, and Cognitive Science, just to name a few, have some sort of stock in artificial intelligence.

There are a lot of cool applications of artificial intelligence. Here are some links to some cool information about artificial intelligence as well as some applications of AI.

Kismet- A robot that is programmed to have expressive features that mimic a humans natural communication.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/lbr/sociable/videos.html

Robocup- Robocup is an international robotics competition where individuals try to develop autonomous soccer playing robots.

http://www.robocup.org/

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wMSiKHPKX4

John McCarthy's Webpage from Standford University

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/

Marvin Minsky's Webpage from MIT

http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/