An Operational Definition

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AI can also be defined by what AI researchers do. This report views AI primarily as a branch of computer science that studies the properties of intelligence by synthesizing intelligence.^[10] Though the advent of AI has depended on the rapid progress of hardware computing resources, the focus here on software reflects a trend in the AI community. More recently, though, progress in building hardware tailored for neural-network-based computing^[11] has created a tighter coupling between hardware and software in advancing AI.

“Intelligence” remains a complex phenomenon whose varied aspects have attracted the attention of several different fields of study, including psychology, economics, neuroscience, biology, engineering, statistics, and linguistics. Naturally, the field of AI has benefited from the progress made by all of these allied fields. For example, the artificial neural network, which has been at the heart of several AI-based solutions^[12] [13] was originally inspired by thoughts about the flow of information in biological neurons.^[14]

[10] Herbert A. Simon, “Artificial Intelligence: An Empirical Science,” Artificial Intelligence 77, no. 2 (1995): 95—127.

[11] Paul Merolla John V. Arthur, Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza, Andrew S. Cassidy, Jun Sawada, Filipp Akopyan, Bryan L. Jackson, Nabil Imam, Chen Guo, Yutaka Nakamura, Bernard Brezzo, Ivan Vo, Steven K. Esser, Rathinakumar Appuswamy, Brian Taba, Arnon Amir, Myron D. Flickner, William P. Risk, Rajit Manohar, and Dharmendra S. Modha, “A Million Spiking-Neuron Integrated Circuit with a Scalable Communication Network and Interface,” accessed August 1, 2016, http://paulmerolla.com/merolla_main_som.pdf.

[12] Gerald Tesauro, “Practical Issues in Temporal Difference Learning,” Machine Learning, no. 8 (1992): 257—77.

[13] David Silver, Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, George van den Driessche, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Veda Panneershelvam, Marc Lanctot, Sander Dieleman, Dominik Grewe, John Nham, Nal Kalchbrenner, Ilya Sutskever, Timothy Lillicrap, Madeleine Leach, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Thore Graepel, and Demis Hassabis, “Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search,” Nature 529 (2016): 484—489.

[14] W. McCulloch and W. Pitts, W., “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5 (1943): 115—133.