INTRODUCTION: WHAT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS NOT

What is artificial intelligence (AI)? You almost certainly have some ideas. Maybe you think that AI is the quest to build HAL. Maybe you think that AI is the quest to build Deep Blue. Maybe you think that AI is a grand waste of time, or impossible, or a bad idea.

These perspectives are indicative of a wide range of thinking about AI. The field of AI itself includes a similarly wide range of thinking about both what AI is and about how it should be achieved. A brief catalog of research areas that are typically included under the heading of AI includes the following:

• Robotics

• Natural Language Processing

• Planning

• Neural Nets

• Computer Vision

• Machine Learning

• Computer Game Playing

• Rule-based Systems

• Case-based Reasoning, and many more.

Concisely defining a field that includes such diverse research areas is a nearly impossible task. Computer game playing, for example, shares little if anything with natural language processing, and yet these are both lumped under the title of AI. Any definition that would include both of those fields might well be so inclusive as to be meaningless.

On the surface, this chapter will be taking on not only that impossible task but two others as well: summarizing the history of AI and the current state of the field. Our hope is not to succeed comprehensively at any one of those tasks, although this chapter will certainly work in those directions.