What is Artificial Intelligence?

We are all here speaking about artificial intelligence, but… what is artificial intelligence? Well, I gave a look around and I couldn’t manage to find any answer to my question.

When I was really starting to be frustrated, I have discovered that I was not the only one who was struggling with this issue. Alan Turing himself, the “inventor” of AI (and, by the way, also the man who lead the team that encrypted Enigma, the machine that Nazis used to send secret messages), haven’t had a clue at the beginning. The biggest problem is to define what “intelligence” means, and so he tried to answer another question: “Can a machine think?”. However, the issue was still not solved, since “thinking” is subjective (how many people believe they are good thinkers…). Thus, to solve this mess he came out with a test, the Turing Test, that answers “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”

The Imitation game is a role game played by three actors: A,B,C. Traditionally, C is a women, B a men and A is the interrogator (either woman or man). Player A is in a separate room and can interact with C and B only by written notes. By asking questions to player C and player B, player A tries to determine which of the two is the man and which is the woman. Player C’s role is to trick the interrogator into making the wrong decision, while player B attempts to assist the interrogator in making the right one.

The Turing Test, at least the standard interpretation of it, adopts the same principle, with the only exception that now player B is substitute by Machine Z and player C becomes a generic human player X. Now, the role of A is to understand who is the computer and who is the human.

Easy to understand, right? The worst thing is that a bunch of well-known experts still believes that this method is not capable explain if something is or is not Artificial Intelligence and tried to develop different, more complicated, models. If you’d like to see pros and cons of the Turing Test and/or start reading tons of definitions depending on the application of the AI, just follow the links below.

Going back to my initial question, so what is, in the end, this bloody Artificial Intelligence?

Well I honestly gave up in finding The Definition, but if you want to have a good idea of what AI is, its application and its consequences, just stay tuned!

If you want to know more about this test, click here