Monday, October 7, 2002		Feature

Intelligent PCs tiptoe
Pratibha Sharma

ARTIFICIAL Intelligent (AI) is a relatively new field. AI began in the earnest with the emergence of modern computer during the 40s and 50s. It was the ability of these new electronic machines to store large amounts of information and process it at a high speed that gave the researchers the vision of building systems that could emulate some human abilities. It is a field of study that seeks to explain and emulate intelligent behaviour in terms of computational processes.

AI is a study of how to make computers do things that at the moment people do better. AI is a branch of computer science that deals with the study and creation of computer systems, which exhibit some form of intelligence: systems that learn new concepts and tasks, systems that can reason and draw useful conclusions about the world around us, systems that can understand natural or perceive and comprehend a visual scene and systems that perform other types of facts which require human types of intelligence.Dictionaries define intelligence as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge or the ability to exercise thought and reasons. Of course intelligence is more than this. It embodies all knowledge and facts, both conscious and unconscious that we acquire through study and experience.

Intelligence is the integrated sum of those facts that gives us the ability to remember a face not seen for 30 years or more or to build and send rockets to the moon. And, as we shall see, the food for this intelligence is knowledge.

Can we ever expect to build systems which exhibit these characteristics? The answer to this question is, yes. During the next few decades, we will witness the introduction of may intelligent computers never dreamt of by the early visionaries. We will see the introduction of systems that equal or exceed human abilities and see them become an important part of most business and government operations as well as daily activities.