Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (also known as machine intelligence and often abbreviated as AI) is intelligence exhibited by any contrived (i.e. artificial) system. The term is often applied to common purpose computers and also in the field of scientific investigation into the theory and practical application of AI. "AI" the name is often used in works of science fiction to refer to that which exhibits artificial intelligence as well, as in "the AI" referring to a singular discrete or distributed mechanism. Modern AI research is disturbed with producing useful machines to automate human tasks requiring intelligent behavior. Examples include: scheduling resources such as military units, answering questions about products for customers, thoughtful and transcribing speech, and recognizing faces in CCTV cameras.

As such, it has become an engineering control, focused on providing solutions to practical problems. AI methods were used to plan units in the first Gulf War, and the costs saved by this efficiency have repaid the US government's entire investment in AI research since the 1950s. AI systems are now in routine use in many businesses, hospitals and military units approximately the world, as well as being built into many common home computer software applications and video games. (See Raj Reddy's AAAI paper for a complete review of real-world AI systems in deployment today.) AI methods are often employed in cognitive science research, which openly tries to model subsystems of human cognition.