Artificial Intelligence:when we hear the name,a robot from a film, looking like a man[like the one in i-Robot movie] flashes before our eyes.So what is artificial intelligence? Experts seem to give a multitude of response to this question.

Some say' it is the ability of machines to do things that is exclusive to humans' yet some say 'it is the ability of a computer or computer assisted machine to do things that require human intervention'

Whatever the definition of artificial intelligence may be, the bottom line is we can create non-human things that can thing/do things on its own.There are many simple applications where artificial intelligence[A.I.] is used,for example our cellular mobile network,security systems,autonomous machines used in construction and machinery,etc.,

But the current applications of A.I. are in the feild of autonomous robots,autonomous flying machines,Face/speech recognition,autonomous machines that don't need human supervision,etc.,

Since the development of the digital computer in the dawn of 1940s, it has been shown that computers can be programmed to carry out very complex tasks—as, for example, discovering proofs for mathematical theorems or playing chess,etc.,. Still, despite continuing advances in computer processing speed and memory capacity, there are as yet no programs that can match human flexibility in tasks under wider domain requiring much everyday knowledge.

A human can do mathematic calculations, at the same time he can recogonise faces,sounds,smell,he can do any physical work when he is aptly trained.But this is hard with A.I. because seperate programs(complex ones) should be written for each operations so creating artificial intelligence was impossible but scientists turned to nature to achieve A.I.Alan Turing,one of the prominent scientist in 1930's who was involved in research in feild of A.I. said "Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain."This idea is extensively used in today's upcoming A.I. where the A.I. is programed to learn.

So how do we create intelligence?

Intelligence can be summarised as

• Learning
• Reasoning
• Problem solving
• Perception
• Language

if we are able to simulate these, we can say that we've created a reasonable A.I.The creation of A.I.is through neural networks/parallel computing methods.Some of intriguing applications that people can experience is Chatter bots.They are programs/softwares that can recogonise and respond to human speech,usually through text but advances in the field allow people to actually converse with chatter bots thro' voice.One such chatter bot[understands whatever you type and speaks accordingly] is ALAN ,it is bein developed in a research facility in Israel,They've named it 'Ai Research'

Here is a link that will enable you to talk to ALAN(you would be amazed by the fluency of ALAN in uderstanding the questions or things you say)

http://www.a-i.com/show_tree.asp?id=124&level=3&root=115

Other applications that are used today are flight control and stabilization,A.I. in games,A.I. in robots and UAVs,A.I for autonomous vehicles like cars and other transport vehicles.