| Discussion on the nature of intelligence long pre-dated the development of the electronic computer, but along with that development came a renewed burst of investigation into what an artificial intelligence would be. There is still no consensus on how to define artificial intelligence: Early definitions tended to discuss the type of behaviours which we would class as intelligent, such as a mathematical theorem proving or displaying medical expertise of a high level. Certainly such tasks are signals to us that the person exhibiting such behaviours is an expert and deemed to be engaging in intelligent behaviours; however, 60 years of experience in programming computers has shown that many behaviours to which we do not ascribe intelligence actually require a great deal of skill. These behaviours tend to be ones which all normal adult humans find relatively easy, such as speech, face recognition, and everyday motion in the world. The fact that we have found it to be extremely difficult to tackle such mundane problems suggests to many scientists that an artificial intelligence cannot simply display the high-level behaviours of an expert but must, in some way, exhibit some of the lowlevel behaviours common to human existence.
Yet this stance does not answer the question of what constitutes an artificial intelligence but merely moves the question to what common low-level behaviours are necessary for an artificial intelligence. It seems unsatisfactory to take the stance which some do, that states that we would know one if we met one. This book takes a very pragmatic approach to the problem by tackling individual problems and seeking to use tools from the artificial intelligence community to solve these problems. The techniques that are used tend to be those which are suggested by human life, such as artificial neural networks and evolutionary algorithms. The underlying reasoning behind such technologies is that we have not created intelligences through such highlevel techniques as logic programming; therefore, there must be something in the actuality of life itself which begets intelligence. For example, the study of artificial neural networks is both an engineering study in that some practitioners wish to build machines based on artificial neural networks which can solve specific problems, but it is also a study which gives us some insight into how our own intelligences are generated. Regardless of the reason given for this study, the common rationale is that there is something in the bricks and mortar of brains — the actual neurons and synapses — which is crucial to the display of intelligence. Therefore, to display intelligence, we are required to create machines which also have artificial neurons and synapses. |