What Is Artificial Intelligence? What are subjects if we want to study Artificial Intelligence?

Question

Could someone tell me what is Artificial Intelligence and what are the subjects that I should study if I wish to break into AI domain?

Answer 1

What is artificial intelligence?

What intelligence is, is such a broad subject that it is difficult to define what is intelligent by itself, let alone artificial intelligence. Instead of that, how we define it is usually based on two scales. Acting rationally or human, and thinking rationally or human.

What acting rationally or human means is that it doesn’t care how a result is come to. It only cares if it appears to be a good result. For example, if you wanted to find an answer to a question, randomly putting out solutions would be fine for this. All “acting” is about, is whether the results appear human. Humans aren’t completely rational, we make some emotional decisions that ultimately aren’t 100% rational. So that’s why there’s that separation.

Thinking, is a whole different game. Here, how you get to answer is just as important as the answer. Perhaps even more so, because if you can figure out how to think, you can do a lot.

What we consider to be an AI, basically covers anything where the computer appears to be acting with some sort of thought. Path finding, neural networks, playing games, driving cars, and more are all under the AI wing.

What are subjects if we want to study artificial intelligence?

There are tons of different subjects that could be studied. Computer Science is usually where the AI classes are most prevalent.

With that said, there’s all kinds of different knowledge that is useful for AI research.

Philosophy helps with for critical thinking. What counts as thinking, questions like that are usually in the philosophy department.

Math also helps with logic. It is also very useful for how certain AI systems are implemented, like neural networks use calculus to backtrack and alter weights.

Psychology. How do people think, how can we apply that to AI.

Linguistics. How we look at language can be pretty important in understanding natural language processing.

The best book for AI is usually considered to be “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” by Russel and Norvig.

It’s the textbook that I used when I first took an AI course, and it covers a lot. MIT OCW also has a few courses that cover AI, and these include lectures.

See this Artificial Intelligence Course for more information :