Artificial Intelligence

The effort to create systems that exhibit apparent intelligence

Inspired by the work of Alan Turing in the 1950s, especially by the "Turing Test" in which questioners had to converse with a system in order to work out if it was controlled by a human being or an artificial system.

In the 1980s the term was used to sell a wide variety of technologies (some of which even worked). The over selling left a legacy of distrust, resulting in a reluctance to use the term. Many of today's most successful technologies exploit AI ideas but steadfastly refuse to categorise themselves using the term.

One of the themes of AI was focused on defining how to represent knowledge. This led to a lot of work on ontologies and automated mechanisms for inference. This is what makes a working knowledge of AI so essential for implementing IA systems.

Links to this page

The following pages link to here: Blackboard, Knowledge Based Systems