Warner's AI site and promotional video for Speilberg's AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the area of computer science focusing on creating machines that can engage on behaviors that humans consider intelligent. The ability to create intelligent machines has intrigued humans since ancient times, and today with the advent of the computer and 50 years of research into AI programming techniques, the dream of smart machines is becoming a reality. Researchers are creating systems which can mimic human thought, understand speech, beat the best human chess player, and countless other feats never before possible.

How May Intelligence Be Demonstrated?

• 1. Learning from experience
• 2. Adapting to changes in an environment
• 3. Receiving and processing vision, speech, and other inputs to obtain information
• 4. Making decisions based on the input of information
• 5. Generating actions and/or memories from the decisions..

Three Levels of Artificial Intelligence

• Alpha-level: non-learning intelligence; past experiences do not enter into decision making.
• Beta-level: capable of elementary learning; past failures affect decision making.
• Gamma-level: the ability to make generalizations from past experiences. Also known as heuristics.

Alan Turing's Test of Machine Intelligence

• Place a person in a room with two computer terminals. One terminal is connected to a terminal in another room with another person at the keyboard. The other terminal is connected to a computer with artificial intelligence in another room.
• Have the person carry on typewritten communication over the two terminals.
• If after 15 minutes, the person cannot tell any difference in communications between the two terminals, the computer has demonstrated intelligence.

Components of an Expert System

• Inference Engine- matches facts and rule conditions; it the controller of the system.
• Knowledge Base- contains the rules.
• Database- collects facts given to the system by the user.
• Natural Language Interface- allows the user to communicate with the expert system in German, French, English, etc.

Fuzzy Logic

• Fuzzy logic is an approach to computing based on "degrees of truth" rather than the usual "true or false" (1 or 0) boolean logic on which the modern computer is based. The idea of fuzzy logic was first advanced by Dr. Lotfi Zadeh of the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s. Dr. Zadeh was working on the problem of computer understanding of natural language. Natural language (like most other activities in life and indeed the universe) is not easily translated into the absolute terms of 0 and 1.

Fuzzy Logic
Fuzzy logic includes 0 and 1 as extreme cases of truth (or "the state of matters" or "fact") but also includes the various states of truth in between so that, for example, the result of a comparison between two things could be not "tall" or "short" but ".38 of tallness."

Fuzzy logic seems closer to the way our brains work. We aggregate data and form a number of partial truths which we aggregate further into higher truths which in turn, when certain thresholds are exceeded, cause certain further results such as motor reaction.

ALICE has been voted the most lifelike of all the on-line chatterbots. ALICE utilizes AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) to form responses to your questions and inputs. The ALICE open source project includes over 300 contributors from around the world.
http://www.alicebot.org/alice_page.htm