The Quest For Artificial Intelligence

by | Sep 1, 2018 | Science | 0 comments

Artificial intelligence (AI) may lack an agreed-upon definition, but someone writing about its history must have some kind of definition in mind. Artificial intelligence is an activity devoted to making machines intelligent, and intelligence is that quality that enables an entity to function appropriately and with foresight in its environment. According to that definition, lots of things – humans, animals, and some machines – are intelligent. Machines, such as ‘smart cameras,’ and many animals are at the primitive end of the extended continuum along which entities with various degrees of intelligence are arrayed.

At the other end are humans, who are able to reason, achieve goals, understand and generate language, perceive and respond to sensory inputs, prove mathematical theorems, play challenging games, synthesize and summarize information, create art and music, and even write histories. Because ‘functioning appropriately and with foresight’ requires so many different capabilities, depending on the environment, we actually have several continua of intelligences with no particularly sharp discontinuities in any of them. For these reasons, I take a rather generous view of what constitutes AI. That means that my history of the subject will, at times, include some control engineering, some electrical engineering, some statistics, some linguistics, some logic, and some computer science.

If AI is about endowing machines with intelligence, what counts as a machine? To many people, a machine is a rather stolid thing. The word evokes images of gears grinding, steam hissing, and steel parts clanking. Nowadays, however, the computer has greatly expanded our notion of what a machine can be. A functioning computer system contains both hardware and software, and we frequently think of the software itself as a ‘machine.’ For example, we refer to ‘chess-playing machines’ and ‘machines that learn,’ when we actually mean the programs that are doing those things. The distinction between hardware and software has become somewhat blurred because most modern computers have some of their programs built right into their hardware circuitry.

The Quest For Artificial Intelligence

by Nils J. Nilsson (PDF) – 707 pages

The Quest For Artificial Intelligence by Nils J. Nilsson

Related Posts

124 Free Ebooks and Resources on Space Exploration and Outer Space

124 Free Ebooks and Resources on Space Exploration and Outer Space

This compilation contains resources about journals, history books and collections, online courses and textbooks, patents, user manuals, reports, research and many more all devoted to the latest discoveries, missions, and phenomena in space exploration. The materials are both mixed between downloadable formats and online reading only, so feel free to bookmark the ones that you find interesting.

83 Free Tools and Resources for Your Citizen Science Projects

83 Free Tools and Resources for Your Citizen Science Projects

A curated list of awesome software and other resources to enable those who want to use scientific tools to empower communities and/or practice various forms of non-institutional science. All of the digital softwares and tools on this list are either free or open-source, so you can use them right away.

42 Curated List of Host-Parasite Information and Databases

42 Curated List of Host-Parasite Information and Databases

This list was originally created by Anna Willoughby and has been filtered for dead links and resources. This list includes few major topics including Databases, Museums / Collections, Citizen Science Projects, Reporting Systems, Taxonomy and Scientific Journals.