Growing up I always thought when AI was achieved it would be something like a robot or computer that was almost sentient. Obviously we haven’t reached those levels yet but I still constantly hear about all these things that are being done with AI. So in simple terms how does our current AI work?
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AI is a *very* broad umbrella. Really, it just refers to *any* piece of software that’s designed to “intelligently” tackle a problem, but that “intelligently” is open to a lot of interpretation. For instance, you can play the game of tic-tac-toe comparatively intelligently, and comparatively unintelligently, but playing intelligently is actually unbelievably easy. Writing an AI to play tic-tac-toe is trivial. But all the same, as a human observer, you’d be able to see a clear difference between a trivial AI, and a program that just randomly picks squares. There’s something in there that we recognize as “intelligence”.
Of course on the other end of the spectrum, you can write a program that let’s a car drive itself. Not so trivial. But all the same, you’d be able to tell the difference between a car driving intelligently, and a car swerving around at random. The particular problem is much harder than tic-tac-toe, and the AI vastly more complicated, but it’s the same sort of subjective judgement being made.
So how then does AI work? Well it depends. You could write a tic-tac-toe AI in which you’ve literally hardcoded every possible board state along with the ideal move to make in that situation. It’s probably not something you’d *want* to do, but you could. Alternatively, you could write an algorithm that plays out different variations internally, and attempts to find a move with which it can force a win no matter what the opponent does. Or you could use machine learning (itself a whole *host* of different techniques) to train a model that can recognize which board positions are winning and which are losing. Ultimately, the approach you take is going to depend on the problem you’re trying to solve. For turn based abstract strategy games like tic-tac-toe, or chess, or checkers, you’ll use something called minimax-search. If you want to automatically label photographs, you might train a neural network. If you want to schedule meetings to minimize conflicts, maybe you’d go with something called integer programming.
So there isn’t really an easy answer. Something is AI if we subjectively judge it to be behaving intelligently, and how the AI actually *works* is going to depend on the problem and the people who wrote it.
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