What is Artificial Intelligence? And Its Types
What is Artificial Intelligence? Are there machines capable of thinking or reasoning like human beings? In this article, we delve into this term and see its present and future applications.
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence is a term that sounds like science fiction. When referring to it, many still think of Hollywood books, comics, or movies, in which a supercomputer uses its knowledge to subdue an overly ambitious human race, now considered superior.
However, AI is genuine, and one could almost say that we are surrounded by it. And every day more, since it is no secret that we need more and more machines that are capable of developing processes that, until recently, were carried out by human beings.
But let’s start from the beginning. The definition of Artificial Intelligence consists of a combination of algorithms that allows a machine (a computer, for example) to execute processes in a similar way to a human being.
In other words, a computer, a program, or any computer system that uses artificial intelligence is capable (or should be) of perceiving data, analyzing it, reasoning about it, and using it accordingly with an objective.
There is some controversy surrounding artificial intelligence. Some believe that a computer can never think or act like a person since its “reasoning” is based on simple data packets and cannot imitate other human behavior. Based on emotions or feelings.
However, the truth is that the actual applications of Artificial Intelligence have been evolving, and it is no longer just about “thinking like humans,” but about making the right decisions within a particular environment, in this case, computer, and even applying it to the real world.
After this brief introduction, it is time to learn more about how artificial intelligence emerged and its evolution to the present day.
A brief history of artificial intelligence
What is the origin of Artificial Intelligence? Who invented it? Despite what it may seem, it is a term that has more than half a century of history in the practical field.
The first practical theories related to AI emerged in the 1940s, but it was not until 1950 that the concept had a definitive ‘boom.’
Much of the blame rested with the scientist and mathematician Alan Turing, considered artificial intelligence’s father. He wrote in the 1950s the work that is regarded as the basis of this discipline, Computing Machinery and intelligence.
In said work, Turing proposes an experiment that continues to be one of the bases for defining AI: the Turing test. The test, theoretical at the time, posed a fictitious conversation between human-human and human-machine. According to Turing, Artificial Intelligence will exist when we cannot distinguish between humans and machines in a blind conversation.
In any case, the term “Artificial Intelligence” was coined by John McCarthy at the famous Dartmouth meeting in 1956, a convention on technology and information sciences that lasted for two months. In this convention, overly optimistic sentences were launched that elevated Artificial Intelligence as the short-term future. However, this excess of optimism caused the term to fall into oblivion for almost two decades.
However, the development of these systems never stopped at the business or government level. It was a time when large-scale computers began, which favored the research of new programs or artificial intelligence systems. Manuals on creating artificial intelligence soon appeared, and more experts on the subject emerged.
In the 1980s, AI became fashionable again thanks to the appearance of the so-called Expert Systems and the research carried out by the Japanese government in its ambitious ” Fifth-generation ” project, which did not end up giving the results. Expected.
Since then, the advancement of technology has been unstoppable, and Artificial Intelligence has not been the exception. One of the significant milestones of this discipline was in the 90s when the Deeper Blue supercomputer (evolution of the first Deep Blue) created by IBM was able to beat the chess champion of that time, Gary Kasparov, in a 6-player matchup. Games.
In the middle of 2020, Artificial Intelligence will be present in many areas, including our daily lives when you play video games against an opponent controlled by the machine, in virtual assistants like Alexa or Google Home, or even in chatbots. Any system capable of imitating human behavior and learning based on its data is considered artificial intelligence.
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Types of artificial Intelligence
There is no clear and specific description of how artificial intelligence works, but it depends on the algorithms and processes used or the objectives pursued. In this sense, one can speak of different types of AI.
Reactive machines
It is the most basic type of artificial intelligence. It only relies on decisions about the present moment but cannot analyze or learn from past data. That is, it does not evolve.
An example of this type of artificial intelligence would be, for example, the Deep above Blue computer. This computer was capable of recognizing the figures on the board and processing 200 million moves in one second. However, his only goal was to process the best move in real-time based on what his opponent did. Other than that, though, Deep Blue ignores any past or future data external to the game or next move processing.
Limited memory
The machines that use this type of artificial intelligence can look into the past but in a limited way. It can store the information it collects for a specific time and adds it to its programming to create new behavior patterns.
The problem is that this information is only added for a limited time, and they cannot make complete and lasting representations as in the case of a human being.
Theory of mind
At this point would be those systems or machines capable of understanding how the people, objects, or procedures surrounding their work. In other words, this artificial intelligence learns based on our behaviors and, based on them; they know what our tastes, needs, desires are or how we expect to be treated.
This type of AI is capable of understanding the environment that surrounds it and is an essential step in carrying out a social interaction that is closer to what would be expected of a human. We delve deeper into this concept in our articles on artificial intelligence and psychology.
Self-awareness
We arrive at marshy lands, usually reserved for science fiction. It is about artificial intelligence being aware of itself and recognizing itself as an independent entity capable of making decisions, differentiating between itself and the objects/people/systems surrounding it.
There are no self-aware machines or systems yet, beyond the evil intelligence we know from movies like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey (HAL) or ‘Terminator 2’ (Skynet), or from books like ‘I have no mouth, and I must scream.
Other authors have simplified this classification, such as Stuart Rusell and Peter Norvig. According to Russell and Norvig, how many types of artificial intelligence are there?
Systems that think like humans
Systems that act like humans
systems that think rationally
Systems that act rationally
