Can machines think?

Can machines think?

The question whether a machine can think, understand, reason and learn, is not so simple. It purely depends on how we define the term “thinking”.

This category is about whether or not computers, robots, and software agents can literally be said to think.  Humans think, chimps think, dogs think, cats and birds think. But do computers?  Is your computer thinking now?  Perhaps only specially programmed computers think?  Or perhaps only computers with special hardware can think -- hardware that resembles the neurons of the brain, for example. If computers can be made to think, then does that mean that humans are a kind of robot and their brains a kind of computer -- a neurocomputer, say?  One of the deeper issues here is that the term "thinking" is ambiguous in at least two ways: It can include being conscious of one's environment (surroundings), one's personal feelings and thoughts, etc., or it can mean cogitate, learn, plan, and solve problems, where these latter terms pick out mental events that may or may not be conscious. According to the second definition of thinking, yes machines can think. But if we consider the first one as machine can have feelings and thoughts then surely no, machines can’t think like humans. It all depends on the context in which we are talking about thinking.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Before describing the term AI let us discuss intelligence first.

What is intelligence?

Intelligence is the capacity of body to understand.

Intelligence is the ability understanding, reasoning and learning.

Intelligence is an umbrella term which defines the abilities of brain of body such as thoughts, reasoning, understanding, leaning from past experience and problem solving.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

The modern definition of artificial intelligence (or AI) is "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success.

John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines."

Other names for the field have been proposed, such as computational intelligence, synthetic intelligence or computational rationality.

The term artificial intelligence is also used to describe a property of machines or programs: the intelligence that the system demonstrates.

AI research uses tools and insights from many fields, including computer science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, operations research, economics, control theory, probability, optimization and logic.

AI attempts to understand how human thinks and use this understanding to build intelligent entities. 

Artificial Intelligence, The state of Art

What can AI do today? A concise answer is difficult because there are so many activities in so many subfields.

Robotic vehicles: 

A driver less robotic car named STANLEY sped through the rough terrain of the Mojave dessert at 22 mph, finishing the 132-mile course first to win the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. STANLEY is a Volkswagen Touareg outfitted with cameras, radar, and laser rangefinders to sense the environment and onboard software to command the steering, braking, and acceleration (Thrun, 2006). The following year CMU’s BOSS won the Urban Challenge, safely driving in traffic through the streets of a closed Air Force base, obeying traffic rules and avoiding pedestrians and other vehicles.

Speech recognition: 

A traveler calling United Airlines to book a flight can have the entire conversation guided by an automated speech recognition and dialog management system. Autonomous planning and scheduling: A hundred million miles from Earth, NASA’s Remote Agent program became the first on-board autonomous planning program to control the scheduling of operations for a spacecraft (Jonsson et al., 2000). REMOTE AGENT generated plans from high-level goals specified from the ground and monitored the execution of those plans—detecting, diagnosing, and recovering from problems as they occurred. Successor program MAPGEN (Al-Chang et al., 2004) plans the daily operations for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers, and MEXAR2 (Cesta et al., 2007) did mission planning—both logistics and science planning—for the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission in 2008.

Game playing:

IBM’s DEEP BLUE became the first computer program to defeat the world champion in a chess match when it bested Garry Kasparov by a score of 3.5 to 2.5 in an exhibition match (Goodman and Keene, 1997). Kasparov said that he felt a “new kind of intelligence” across the board from him. Newsweek magazine described the match as “The brain’s last stand.” The value of IBM’s stock increased by $18 billion. Human champions studied Kasparov’s loss and were able to draw a few matches in subsequent years, but the most recent human-computer matches have been won convincingly by the computer.

Spam fighting:

Each day, learning algorithms classify over a billion messages as spam, saving the recipient from having to waste time deleting what, for many users, could comprise 80% or 90% of all messages, if not classified away by algorithms. Because the spammers are continually updating their tactics, it is difficult for a static programmed approach to keep up, and learning algorithms work best (Sahami et al., 1998; Goodman and Heckerman, 2004).

Logistics planning:

 During the Persian Gulf crisis of 1991, U.S. forces deployed a Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool, DART (Cross and Walker, 1994), to do automated logistics planning and scheduling for transportation. This involved up to 50,000 vehicles, cargo, and people at a time, and had to account for starting points, destinations, routes, and conflict resolution among all parameters. The AI planning techniques generated in hours a plan that would have taken weeks with older methods. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) stated that this single application more than paid back DARPA’s 30-year investment in AI.

Robotics:

 The iRobot Corporation has sold over two million Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners for home use. The company also deploys the more rugged PackBot to Iraq and Afghanistan, where it is used to handle hazardous materials, clear explosives, and identify the location of snipers.

Machine Translation: 

A computer program automatically translates from Arabic to English, allowing an English speaker to see the headline “Ardogan Confirms That Turkey Would Not Accept Any Pressure, Urging Them to Recognize Cyprus.” The program uses a statistical model built from examples of Arabic-to-English translations and from examples of English text totaling two trillion words (Brants et al., 2007). None of the computer scientists on the team speak Arabic, but they do understand statistics and machine learning algorithms.