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Artificial intelligence
• Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the capability of computational
systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence,
such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and
decision-making.
• It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies
methods and software that enable machines to perceive their
environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that
maximize their chances of achieving defined goals.[1]
• Such machines may be called AIs.
• High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines
(e.g., Google Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube,
Amazon, and Netflix); virtual assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri,
and Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); generative and
creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT and AI art); and superhuman play and
analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go).
• However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: "A lot of
cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without
being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and
common enough it's not labeled AI anymore
• various subfields of AI research are centered around particular goals and
the use of particular tools.
• The traditional goals of AI research include reasoning, knowledge
representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception,
and support for robotics.[a] General intelligence—the ability to complete
any task performed by a human on an at least equal level—is among the
field's long-term goals.[4] To reach these goals, AI researchers have adapted
and integrated a wide range of techniques, including search and
mathematical optimization, formal logic, artificial neural networks, and
methods based on statistics, operations research, and economics.[b] AI also
draws upon psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, and other
fields
• Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956,[6] and the
field went through multiple cycles of optimism throughout its history,[7][8]
followed by periods of disappointment and loss of funding, known as AI winters.
[9][10] Funding and interest vastly increased after 2012 when deep learning
outperformed previous AI techniques.[11] This growth accelerated further after
2017 with the transformer architecture,[12] and by the early 2020s many billions
of dollars were being invested in AI and the field experienced rapid ongoing
progress in what has become known as the AI boom. The emergence of
advanced generative AI in the midst of the AI boom and its ability to create and
modify content exposed several unintended consequences and harms in the
present and raised concerns about the risks of AI and its long-term effects in the
future, prompting discussions about regulatory policies to ensure the safety and
benefits of the technology.
Goals
• The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been
broken into subproblems. These consist of particular traits or
capabilities that researchers expect an intelligent system to display.
The traits described below have received the most attention and
cover the scope of AI research
Reasoning and problem-solving

• Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step

reasoning that humans use when they solve puzzles or make logical
deductions.[13] By the late 1980s and 1990s, methods were
developed for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information,
employing concepts from probability and economics.[14]
• Many of these algorithms are insufficient for solving large reasoning
problems because they experience a "combinatorial explosion": They
become exponentially slower as the problems grow.[15] Even humans
rarely use the step-by-step deduction that early AI research could
model. They solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive
judgments.[16] Accurate and efficient reasoning is an unsolved
problem.
• Knowledge representation and knowledge engineering[17] allow AI
programs to answer questions intelligently and make deductions
about real-world facts.
• Formal knowledge representations are used in content-based
indexing and retrieval,[18] scene interpretation,[19] clinical decision
support,[20] knowledge discovery (mining "interesting" and
actionable inferences from large databases),[21] and other areas.[22]
• A knowledge base is a body of knowledge represented in a form that
can be used by a program. An ontology is the set of objects, relations,
concepts, and properties used by a particular domain of knowledge.
[23] Knowledge bases need to represent things such as objects,
properties, categories, and relations between objects;[24] situations,
events, states, and time;[25] causes and effects;[26] knowledge about
knowledge (what we know about what other people know);[27]
default reasoning (things that humans assume are true until they are
told differently and will remain true even when other facts are
changing);[28] and many other aspects and domains of knowledge.
• Among the most difficult problems in knowledge representation are
the breadth of commonsense knowledge (the set of atomic facts that
the average person knows is enormous);[29] and the sub-symbolic
form of most commonsense knowledge (much of what people know
is not represented as "facts" or "statements" that they could express
verbally).[16] There is also the difficulty of knowledge acquisition, the
problem of obtaining knowledge for AI applications
• An "agent" is anything that perceives and takes actions in the world. A rational agent has goals
or preferences and takes actions to make them happen.[d][32] In automated planning, the
agent has a specific goal.[33] In automated decision-making, the agent has preferences—there
are some situations it would prefer to be in, and some situations it is trying to avoid. The
decision-making agent assigns a number to each situation (called the "utility") that measures
how much the agent prefers it. For each possible action, it can calculate the "expected utility":
the utility of all possible outcomes of the action, weighted by the probability that the outcome
will occur. It can then choose the action with the maximum expected utility.

• In classical planning, the agent knows exactly what the effect of any action will be.[35] In most
real-world problems, however, the agent may not be certain about the situation they are in (it
is "unknown" or "unobservable") and it may not know for certain what will happen after each
possible action (it is not "deterministic"). It must choose an action by making a probabilistic
guess and then reassess the situation to see if the action worked
• In some problems, the agent's preferences may be uncertain, especially if there are other agents
or humans involved. These can be learned (e.g., with inverse reinforcement learning), or the
agent can seek information to improve its preferences.[37] Information value theory can be used
to weigh the value of exploratory or experimental actions.[38] The space of possible future
actions and situations is typically intractably large, so the agents must take actions and evaluate
situations while being uncertain of what the outcome will be.

• A Markov decision process has a transition model that describes the probability that a particular
action will change the state in a particular way and a reward function that supplies the utility of
each state and the cost of each action. A policy associates a decision with each possible state.
The policy could be calculated (e.g., by iteration), be heuristic, or it can be learned.[39]

• Game theory describes the rational behavior of multiple interacting agents and is used in AI
programs that make decisions that involve other agents.[40]
Learning
• Machine learning is the study of programs that can improve their performance on a given task automatically.
[41] It has been a part of AI from the beginning.[e]

• There are several kinds of machine learning. Unsupervised learning analyzes a stream of data and finds
patterns and makes predictions without any other guidance.[44] Supervised learning requires labeling the
training data with the expected answers, and comes in two main varieties: classification (where the program
must learn to predict what category the input belongs in) and regression (where the program must deduce a
numeric function based on numeric input).[45]

• In reinforcement learning, the agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones. The agent
learns to choose responses that are classified as "good".[46] Transfer learning is when the knowledge gained
from one problem is applied to a new problem.[47] Deep learning is a type of machine learning that runs
inputs through biologically inspired artificial neural networks for all of these types of learning.[48]

• Computational learning theory can assess learners by computational complexity, by sample complexity (how
much data is required), or by other notions of optimization
Natural language processing

• Natural language processing (NLP)[50] allows programs to read, write and communicate in human
languages such as English. Specific problems include speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine
translation, information extraction, information retrieval and question answering.[51]

• Early work, based on Noam Chomsky's generative grammar and semantic networks, had difficulty with
word-sense disambiguation[f] unless restricted to small domains called "micro-worlds" (due to the common
sense knowledge problem[29]). Margaret Masterman believed that it was meaning and not grammar that
was the key to understanding languages, and that thesauri and not dictionaries should be the basis of
computational language structure.

• Modern deep learning techniques for NLP include word embedding (representing words, typically as vectors
encoding their meaning),[52] transformers (a deep learning architecture using an attention mechanism),[53]
and others.[54] In 2019, generative pre-trained transformer (or "GPT") language models began to generate
coherent text,[55][56] and by 2023, these models were able to get human-level scores on the bar exam, SAT
test, GRE test, and many other real-world applications
Perception

• Machine perception is the ability to use input from sensors (such as

cameras, microphones, wireless signals, active lidar, sonar, radar, and
tactile sensors) to deduce aspects of the world. Computer vision is the
ability to analyze visual input.[58]

• The field includes speech recognition,[59] image classification,[60]

facial recognition, object recognition,[61]object tracking,[62] and
robotic perception
AI research uses a wide variety of techniques to
accomplish the goals above.[b]

• Search and optimization

• AI can solve many problems by intelligently searching through many possible solutions.[68] There are two very
different kinds of search used in AI: state space search and local search.
• State space search

• State space search searches through a tree of possible states to try to find a goal state.[69] For example, planning
algorithms search through trees of goals and subgoals, attempting to find a path to a target goal, a process called
means-ends analysis.[70]

• Simple exhaustive searches[71] are rarely sufficient for most real-world problems: the search space (the number of
places to search) quickly grows to astronomical numbers. The result is a search that is too slow or never completes.
[15] "Heuristics" or "rules of thumb" can help prioritize choices that are more likely to reach a goal.[72]

• Adversarial search is used for game-playing programs, such as chess or Go. It searches through a tree of possible
moves and countermoves, looking for a winning position
Local search

• Illustration of gradient descent for 3 different starting points; two parameters (represented
by the plan coordinates) are adjusted in order to minimize the loss function (the height)

• Local search uses mathematical optimization to find a solution to a problem. It begins with
some form of guess and refines it incrementally.[74]

• Gradient descent is a type of local search that optimizes a set of numerical parameters by
incrementally adjusting them to minimize a loss function. Variants of gradient descent are
commonly used to train neural networks,[75] through the backpropagation algorithm.

• Another type of local search is evolutionary computation, which aims to iteratively improve
a set of candidate solutions by "mutating" and "recombining" them, selecting only the
fittest to survive each generation
AI research uses a wide variety of
techniques to accomplish the goals
above
Logic
• Formal logic is used for reasoning and knowledge representation.[78] Formal
logic comes in two main forms: propositional logic (which operates on
statements that are true or false and uses logical connectives such as "and",
"or", "not" and "implies")[79] and predicate logic (which also operates on
objects, predicates and relations and uses quantifiers such as "Every X is a Y"
and "There are some Xs that are Ys").[80]

• Deductive reasoning in logic is the process of proving a new statement

(conclusion) from other statements that are given and assumed to be true
(the premises).[81] Proofs can be structured as proof trees, in which nodes
are labelled by sentences, and children nodes are connected to parent nodes
by inference rules.
Probabilistic methods for
uncertain reasoning
• Many problems in AI (including in reasoning, planning, learning,
perception, and robotics) require the agent to operate with
incomplete or uncertain information. AI researchers have devised a
number of tools to solve these problems using methods from
probability theory and economics.[86] Precise mathematical tools
have been developed that analyze how an agent can make choices
and plan, using decision theory, decision analysis,[87] and information
value theory.[88] These tools include models such as Markov decision
processes,[89] dynamic decision networks,[90] game theory and
mechanism design
Classifiers and statistical
learning methods
• The simplest AI applications can be divided into two types: classifiers
(e.g., "if shiny then diamond"), on one hand, and controllers (e.g., "if
diamond then pick up"), on the other hand. Classifiers[98] are
functions that use pattern matching to determine the closest match.
They can be fine-tuned based on chosen examples using supervised
learning. Each pattern (also called an "observation") is labeled with a
certain predefined class. All the observations combined with their
class labels are known as a data set. When a new observation is
received, that observation is classified based on previous experience
• There are many kinds of classifiers in use.[99] The decision tree is the
simplest and most widely used symbolic machine learning algorithm.
[100] K-nearest neighbor algorithm was the most widely used
analogical AI until the mid-1990s, and Kernel methods such as the
support vector machine (SVM) displaced k-nearest neighbor in the
1990s.[101] The naive Bayes classifier is reportedly the "most widely
used learner"[102] at Google, due in part to its scalability.[103] Neural
networks are also used as classifiers
Artificial neural networks

• An artificial neural network is based on a collection of nodes also

known as artificial neurons, which loosely model the neurons in a
biological brain. It is trained to recognise patterns; once trained, it can
recognise those patterns in fresh data. There is an input, at least one
hidden layer of nodes and an output. Each node applies a function
and once the weight crosses its specified threshold, the data is
transmitted to the next layer. A network is typically called a deep
neural network if it has at least 2 hidden layers.[104]
• Learning algorithms for neural networks use local search to choose
the weights that will get the right output for each input during
training. The most common training technique is the backpropagation
algorithm.[105] Neural networks learn to model complex
relationships between inputs and outputs and find patterns in data. In
theory, a neural network can learn any function.[106]
• In feedforward neural networks the signal passes in only one direction.
[107]
• Recurrent neural networks feed the output signal back into the input,
which allows short-term memories of previous input events. Long short
term memory is the most successful network architecture for recurrent
networks.[108]
• Perceptrons[109] use only a single layer of neurons; deep learning[110]
uses multiple layers. Convolutional neural networks strengthen the
connection between neurons that are "close" to each other—this is
especially important in image processing, where a local set of neurons
must identify an "edge" before the network can identify an object
Deep learning

• Deep learning[110] uses several layers of neurons between the

network's inputs and outputs. The multiple layers can progressively
extract higher-level features from the raw input. For example, in
image processing, lower layers may identify edges, while higher layers
may identify the concepts relevant to a human such as digits, letters,
or faces.[112]
• Deep learning has profoundly improved the performance of programs in
many important subfields of artificial intelligence, including computer
vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, image
classification,[113] and others. The reason that deep learning performs so
well in so many applications is not known as of 2021.[114] The sudden
success of deep learning in 2012–2015 did not occur because of some new
discovery or theoretical breakthrough (deep neural networks and
backpropagation had been described by many people, as far back as the
1950s)[i] but because of two factors: the incredible increase in computer
power (including the hundred-fold increase in speed by switching to GPUs)
and the availability of vast amounts of training data, especially the giant
curated datasets used for benchmark testing, such as ImageNet