Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans; sensing, reasoning, pattern recognition, speech recognition, and problem-solving. AI is an area of research that goes back to the very beginnings of computer science. The idea of building a machine that can perform tasks perceived as requiring human intelligence is an attractive one. The degree of sophistication that constitutes AI tends to be revised upwards with each new generation of computers. At its most ambitious level AI has the goal of creating computers and robots capable of reproducing a broad range of human behaviour. Unlike the human brain, most computers act serially, one operation at a time. Even supercomputers developed in the 1980s that use 'parallel processing' to carry out billions of operations per second barely begin to match human brain capacity.