ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

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. 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. Doubts remain about whether such systems are theoretically or practically possible, because of the vast complexity of the human brain. 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. The tasks that have been studied from this point of view include games, language translation, natural-language understanding, fault diagnosis, robotics, and supplying expert advice.