All About Artificial Intelligence

What is Intelligence?

Have you ever thought about why or when you are called intelligent? One can safely say that you have. Even if not, here are some of the situations in which you would feel proud of your intelligence:

• When you get all questions correct in a tough exam
• When you solve a challenging puzzle in record time
• When you can recognize and remember the names of all the players of your favorite football team

But what exactly is intelligence?

Intelligence is the ability to

• Perceive, understand and analyze information.
• Learn and increase knowledge.
• Make decisions based on knowledge.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is the ability of a machine to think, understand, and learn like human beings.

A computer is termed as intelligent if it has the ability for gathering information, analyzing it to make decisions, and acting to complete a task automatically with very little to no human intervention.

Advantage of AI

There are many advantages that an AI machine has over humans. Some of them are:

1. Speed of execution: Computers have better memories. They can be fed a large amount of information and can retrieve it almost instantaneously. While a doctor makes a diagnosis in ~10 minutes, an AI system can make a million in the same duration.
2. They are not lazy: Computers don’t require sleep the way humans do. They can calculate, analyze, and perform tasks tirelessly and round the clock without wearing out.
3. Accuracy: Computers have a very high accuracy in some tasks.
4. Less Biased: Computers are not affected or influenced by emotions, feelings, wants, needs, and other factors that often cloud our judgment and intelligence.

Applications of AI

AI has many applications, which continue to grow by the day. Some of them are:

Computer Vision

AI is used in many popular object recognition systems like self-driving cars, security systems, industrial robots, etc. In this example, the robot identifies the position of the pancakes and segregate them using a robotic arm.

Face Recognition

AI is widely used to detect and recognize faces from images. Facebook uses it to identify people in photos and tag them.

Gaming

AI plays an important role in helping a machine think of a large number of possible positions based on deep knowledge in strategic games such as chess or PUBG. An AI system called AlphaZero taught itself from scratch how to master the games of Chess, Shogi, and Go.

Expert Systems

Machine or software that imitates the decision-making ability of humans and uses it to provide explanations and advice to the users, e.g. Youtube uses it to recommend you new videos.

Speech Recognition

Some AI-based speech recognition systems can ‘hear’ others, ‘express’ in the form of speech and understand what a person tells it, e.g., Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant.

Text Recognition from Image

The handwriting recognition software reads the text written on paper and recognizes the shape of the letters and converts them into editable text.

Intelligent Robots

These robots can perform the instructions given by a human in an interactive manner.

In the next topic, we’ll use artificial intelligence to make an expression detector using Quarky. Let’s get to it!