Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches

This chapter provides an overview of artificial intelligence. There is no difficulty in writing a program that will exhibit a simple form of learning, for example, learning to recognize abbreviations for people's names. If computers had existed in the late 17th century and people had known how to write generalized learning programs, then a machine equipped with such a program would have been ready to absorb the work of Newton when it was published, and in due course that of Faraday and Einstein; it would now be doing its best with black holes. The problem is illustrated well by Arthur Samuel's pioneering work on programs for playing checkers. His main interest was in exploring the method of recursive board search later taken up with such success by writers of chess programs, but he was also interested in seeing whether he could make his program learn from its experience and play a better game in the future. Some very complex learning programs have been written and have been highly impressive when demonstrated to a nontechnical audience. They have, however, always turned out to be programs that optimize their performance by modifying their internal state, either by adjusting parameters or by updating data structures. Originally, the term artificial intelligence was used exclusively in the sense of Turing's dream that a computer might be programmed to behave like an intelligent human being.