Artificial intelligence (AI) | Reasoning, problem-solving | Strong AI Vs Weak AI

Artificial intelligence (AI)

What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI), the ability of a digital commuter or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. Since the development of the digital computer in the 1940s, it has been demonstrated that computers can be programmed to carry out very complex tasks—such as discovering proofs for mathematical theorems or playing chess—with great proficiency. Still, despite continuing advances in computer processing speed and memory capacity, there are as yet no programs that can match full human flexibility over wider domains or in tasks requiring much everyday knowledge. On the other hand, some programs have attained the performance levels of human experts and professionals in performing certain specific tasks, so that artificial intelligence in this limited sense is found in applications as diverse as medical diagnosis, computer search engines, voice or handwriting recognition, and chatbots.

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956. The field went through multiple cycles of optimism followed by disappointment and loss of funding, but after 2012, when deep learning surpassed all previous AI techniques, there was a vast increase in funding and interest.

Reasoning, problem-solving

Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that humans use when they solve puzzles or make logical deductions. Scientist and Mechanical engineers develop  Artificial intelligence for problem solving.By the late 1980s and 1990s, methods were developed for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics.

Many of these algorithms are insufficient for solving large reasoning problems because they experience a "combinatorial explosion": they became exponentially slower as the problems grew larger. Even humans rarely use the step-by-step deduction that early AI research could model. They solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive judgments. Accurate and efficient reasoning is an unsolved problem.

General intelligence

A machine with artificial general intelligence should be able to solve a wide variety of problems with breadth and versatility similar to human intelligence.

Strong AI Vs Weak AI 

Intelligence is tricky to define, which is why AI experts typically distinguish between strong AI and weak AI.

Strong AI

Strong AI, also known as artificial general intelligence, is a machine that can solve problems it’s never been trained to work on — much like a human can. This is the kind of AI we see in movies, like the robots from Westworld or the character Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This type of AI doesn’t actually exist yet.

The creation of a machine with human-level intelligence that can be applied to any task is the Holy Grail for many AI researchers, but the quest for artificial general intelligence has been fraught with difficulty. And some believe strong AI research should be limited, due to the potential risks of creating a powerful AI without appropriate guardrails.

In contrast to weak AI, strong AI represents a machine with a full set of cognitive abilities — and an equally wide array of use cases — but time hasn't eased the difficulty of achieving such a feat.

Weak AI

Weak AI, sometimes referred to as narrow AI or specialized AI, operates within a limited context and is a simulation of human intelligence applied to a narrowly defined problem (like driving a car, transcribing human speech or curating content on a website).

Weak AI is often focused on performing a single task extremely well. While these machines may seem intelligent, they operate under far more constraints and limitations than even the most basic human intelligence.

Weak AI examples include:

• Siri, Alexa and other smart assistants
• Self-driving cars
• Google search
• Conversational bots
• Email spam filters
• Netflix’s recommend

AI and machine learning technology is used in most of the essential applications of the 2023s, including: search engines (such as Google Search), targeting online advertisements, recommendation systems (offered by Netflix, YouTube or Amazon), driving internet traffic, targeted advertising (AdSense, Facebook), virtual assistants (such as Siri or Alexa), autonomous vehicles (including drones, ADAS and self-driving cars), automatic language translation (Microsoft Translator, Google Translate), facial recognition (Apple's Face ID or Microsoft's DeepFace and Google's FaceNet) and image labeling (used by Facebook, Apple's iPhoto and TikTok).

There are also thousands of successful AI applications used to solve specific problems for specific industries or institutions. In a 2017 survey, one in five companies reported they had incorporated "AI" in some offerings or processes. A few examples are energy storage, medical diagnosis, military logistics, applications that predict the result of judicial decisions,foreign policy, or supply chain management.