Written by Leah Bramble.
Artificial intelligence describes decisions made purely by a computer based on its previous experience. This is useful as it reduces the number of humans required for such tasks. Robot workers are more useful for businesses as they don’t require wages and are less likely to go wrong (but when they go wrong, they go very wrong). The concept of artificial intelligence was first coined by Alan Turing, a British mathematician, whilst he was studying at the University of Cambridge. Turing is probably most renowned for devising the Turing test, a means to devise the intelligence level of a robot. The Turing test is conducted by a neutral party, who reads two answers to a simple question – one answer is produced by a human, the other by a robot. If the party cannot easily guess which one has been written by the human, the robot has passed the Turing test. The first robot to pass the Turing test was a robot named Eugene Goostman(1), who was created by computer scientists Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko.
Artificial intelligence has also been used to play games. In 2011, IBM, an American computer company, attempted to program a robot named Watson(2) to play the quiz game Jeopardy!, where players are given an answer to a question and have to guess a possible question. Due to the often abstract nature of the questions and hints, Watson didn’t fare well during the initial rounds. However, Watson rapidly began to improve, even when playing against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two of the most successful Jeopardy! players to date. At the end of the tournament, Watson had won 65% of its matches.
Simple artificial intelligence is relatively simple to create. There are many robotics websites on the internet which allow users to virtually simulate robots, allowing for the creation of artificial intelligence in a virtual environment. One popular site is CoppeliaSim, which programs in C++, Python and Lua. The ‘Introduction to Python’ course on this website is a great way to begin programming.
References:
Computer AI passes Turing test in ‘world first’ (2014, June 9), BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27762088
IBM Watson (2024, April 2), Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Watson