Artificial Intelligence is a concept that concerned people from all around the world and from all times. Ancient Greeks and Egyptians represented in their myths and philosophy machines and artificial entities which have qualities resembling to those of humans, especially in what thinking, reasoning and intelligence are concerned.
Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science concerned with the study and the design of the intelligent machines. The term of “artificial intelligence”, coined at the conference that took place at Dartmouth in 1956 comes from John McCarthy who defined it as the science of creating intelligent machine.
Along with the development of the electronic computers, back in 1940s, this domain and concept known as artificial intelligence and concerned with the creation of intelligent machines resembling to humans, more precisely, having qualities such as those of a human being, started produce intelligent machines.
The disciplines implied by the artificial intelligence are extremely various. Fields of knowledge such as Mathematics, Psychology, Philosophy, Logic, Engineering, Social Sciences, Cognitive Sciences and Computer Science are extremely important and closely interrelated are extremely important when it comes to artificial intelligence. All these fields and sciences contribute to the creation of intelligent machines that have resemblance to human beings.
The application areas of artificial intelligence are extremely various such as Robotics, Soft Computing, Learning Systems, Planning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Logic Programming, Natural Language Processing, Image Recognition, Image Understanding, Computer Vision, Scheduling, Expert Systems and more others.
The field of artificial intelligence has recorded a rapid and spectacular evolution since 1956, researchers achieving great successes in creating intelligent machines capable of partially doing what human beings are able to do.
Obviously, researchers have encountered and still encounter several problems in simulating the human intelligence. An intelligent machine must have a number of characteristics and must correspond to some particular standards. For instance, the human being is able of solving a problem faster by using mainly intuitive judgments rather than conscious judgments.
Another aspect that researchers have considerably analyzed was the knowledge representation which refers to the knowledge about the world that intelligent machines must have in order to solve problems such as objects or categories of objects, properties of objects, relations between objects, relations such as those between causes and effects, circumstances, situations etc.
Moreover, another challenge for researchers in the field of artificial intelligence refers to the fact that intelligent machines must be able to plan the problems that need to be solved, to set a number of goals that must be achieved, to be able to make choices and predict actions, they must be able learn, to understand the human languages and to display emotions and be able to understand and predict the behavior of the others.
Artificial intelligence is an extremely challenging and vast field of knowledge which poses many questions and generates many controversies but also solves many problems that technology and industry are confronting with today and may offer many answers in the future.