Artificial intelligence

 Artificial Intelligence, defined in simple terms

September 16, 2017

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a topic that has been discussed in philosophy and science fiction for decades but has rapidly become a reality.

In 2017, AI became a household name. It was all over the news every day with companies like Google investing billions of dollars into developing more and more AI applications.

AI covers some fascinating areas, from how we design intelligent machines to what our future might look like when these machines are more ubiquitous than humans.

An example might be when Siri tells you when it will rain in your city today.

When people are asked about AI, they usually think of Hollywood blockbusters like The Terminator.

It’s not surprising that someone who has never heard nor seen any mention about artificial intelligence before often conjures up images similar to movies such as The Terminator— something which most might consider an accurate representation.

They think we are at a point where AI applications can do all things for us— take care of our jobs, make decisions without consulting with humans, and so forth.Machine learning (ML) is a subset of artificial intelligence and is a science of getting computers to learn and act as humans do.

In traditional programming, a computer is given input data and an algorithm to produce an output.

If a computer is given input data with the corresponding output data, it can learn the algorithm itself and, therefore, continue to predict the right output data. This is called supervised learning.

Alternatively, if a computer is given a complex set of input data with no corresponding output data, the machine identifies the relationships in the data to provide valuable insights for decision-makers. This is called unsupervised learning.