Introduction

This site is concerned with the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically its applications and methods. We define artificial intelligence as the design of machines or agents that act intelligently.

An agent acts intelligently if it

1. reacts to an environment.
2. does what is appropriate for its circumstances and goals.
3. is flexible to changing environments and goals.
4. learns from experience.
5. makes choices from perceptual limitations.

A distinction is often made between weak and strong articifical intelligence.

Weak AI is dedicated to a single task, such as speaking to an automated voice on a telephone call. "How may I direct your call?" sometimes receives an angry response when the application fails to respond to your reply. If it is a sentient bot, that is, able to detect human emotion, the application may steer you to a human.

Strong AI is able to represent knowledge, and can reason, plan, and learn, and can communicate with a human being. A strong AI app may be autonomous, or at least give the illusion of being autonomous. It may still be under human control, particularly if it is subject to Isaac Asimov's three well known laws:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

An outline of this site is as follows:

   
      1. Intro  
      2. Books on Artificial Intelligence
      3. Review of Data Structures 
      4. Algorithms
      5. Trees and Graphs
      6. Expert Systems
      7. Machine Learning and Neural Nets
      8. Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing
      9. Computer Vision      
      10. Robotics