AI Systems and Definitions

A good general definition of AI could be:

AI is the part of computer science concerned with designing intelligent computer systems, that is, computer systems that exhibit the characteristics we associate with intelligence in human behaviour - understanding language, learning, reasoning and solving problems.

There are many other suitable definitions -- See Last year's AI1 notes (Lecture 1).

A theme we will develop in this course is that most AI systems can broken into:

• Search,
• Knowledge Representation,
• applications of the above.

Search has been studied in great depth last year Last year's AI1 notes (Lecture 3) .

• Knowledge representation deals with finding a means of encoding knowledge so that a machine can use it.
• e.g Expert systems have to work with a knowledge base as do many other reasoning tasks.
• We will look at knowledge representation early on in this course.

• Tasks such a planning, reasoning, learning, understanding basically involve some searching and perhaps updating of a knowledge base.
• Tasks such as vision, natural language understanding, speech recognition and robot planning involve searching knowledge also. We will look at some of these tasks in the remainder of the course.