Before explaining what Artificial Intelligence is, I will explain first what Intelligence is. Intelligence can be defined as ability to think and understand in place of doing things by instinct or automatically. Thinking may be the activity of using your brain to consider a problem or to create an idea. Intelligence is also refers to ability to understand and learn things. Intelligence is the quality possessed by humans. Now we can say that, in order to think, someone or something has to have a brain, or an organ that enables someone or something to learn and understand things, to solve problems and to make decisions. So, intelligence may be defined as ‘the ability to learn and understand, to solve problems and to make decisions’.

The question that asks whether computers can be intelligent, or whether machines can think, from this, the concept of artificial intelligence is emerged. The artificial intelligence (AI) can be defined as a science is to make machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans. Therefore, question ‘Can machines think?” can be arises. Artificial Intelligence can be defined various ways. Some definitions of them are as “The learning or study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better.”  “The technique of creating machines that performs task that require intelligence when performed by the people.”  “The automation of activities that we associate with human thinking, activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning.”

The Turing Test, that is given by Alan Turing (1950), was designed to provide a satisfactory operational definition of intelligence. A computer or any machine passes the test if a human interrogator, after posing some written questions, cannot tell whether the written responses come from a person or from a computer.

The machine or computer would require having the following capabilities:

  • Natural language processing that enables to communicate successfully in English.
  • Knowledge representation which is used to store what it knows or hears.
  • Automated reasoning which is use the stored information to answer questions and to infer new conclusions.
  • Machine learning should adapt to new situations and to detect and describe the patterns.

The above mention test avoids direct physical interaction between the interrogator and the computer, because physical simulation of a person is unnecessary for intelligence. the Total Turing Test contain a video signal so that the interrogator can test the subject’s perceptual abilities, as well as the opportunity for the interrogator to pass physical objects “by the hatch.” For qualify the total Turing Test, the computer will need.

  • Computer vision to perceive objects.
  • Robotics to modify objects and move about.

These above six disciplines compose most of AI.

Some applications of Artificial Intelligence are:

  • Robotic vehicles
  • Speech recognition
  • Autonomous planning and scheduling
  • Game playing
  • Spam fighting
  • Logistics planning
  • Machine Translation