Since its invention, the computer has evolved significantly in terms of the functionalities and efficiency. Computers systems have had diverse working domains. As a result, companies have placed massive bets on this ever-changing technology. Today, there is a need to make computers that have functionalities that are more or less, like human beings. This idea of developing computer systems to perform functions that ordinarily require human intelligence has been termed as human intelligence.This post will let you know what is artificial intelligence (AI), how it works and about artificial intelligence techniques.
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What is artificial intelligence (AI)?
This is a way of making a digitalized computer, computer software, or a computer-controlled robot to perform tasks that are associated with human beings intelligence. The term is also used where there is a need to come up with a system that is endowed with cerebral characteristics of human beings.
How artificial intelligence works
Artificial intelligence has been wired to think and act like the human brain. In order to work in this manner, the artificial intelligence uses the following components; learning, reasoning, problem solving, perception and use of language. After solving a given tech problem, the computer learns to store the solution and produces the results when encountered with a similar problem in future. The computer reasons by means of drawing inferences in order to solve a given problem. The computer is further advanced with optical sensors that are used during perception in order to integrate the next course of action. The use of a variety of signs in a computer system allows the artificial intelligence to develop a language that is used in different contexts.
Artificial intelligence techniques
Heuristics
This technique uses a trial and error means in order to discover or solve a practical complex problem. Some problems will require a tailored heuristics design that will exploit the structure of a problem. For instance, suppose there are coins in the following denominations: 6 cents, 5 cents, 4 cents and 1 cent, and that there is a need to create the amount of 8 cents. A greedy heuristic will choose the largest denomination and repeat it with any other denominations until a solution is arrived at. In this case, the heuristic will select 6 cents, and for the remaining two cents, it will pick 1 cent in multiple sequences. The greedy heuristic, therefore, ends up with a solution of (6, 1, 1) in order to get a value of 8. Although there is another option of choosing 4, twice, the greedy heuristic will not produce a desirable result for this case.
Natural language processing
This technique is used majorly in the speech recognition and language generation. In a speech technique, the words in a sentence are specifically tagged to correspond to a given category of words that bears the same grammatical property. This is based on the relation of the word to adjacent words. Paragraphs and sentences are also tagged. The speech recognition is performed by statistical models that are generated through probabilistic means. A common technique employed here is the Hidden Markov Model (HMM). It uses a series of ‘remember’ sequences of the word appearing before, making an estimate of the part of speech in which the word belongs.
Support vector machine
This technique is used in solving classification problems. The technique tries to find a boundary line that clearly distinguishes between two classes of data. It creates a separation using new and unseen data-points. An example is when classifying an email as either spam or an inbox. Here, you may decide to use two dotted lines to represent the different segments. The actual classification boundary used will, therefore, be a solid line in the middle of the dotted lines. In case these supporting vectors are slightly moved, the position of the dotted line will also change. This will mean that the position of solid classification will also change.
Daily use of artificial intelligence
Detection of fraud
To distinguish and monitor fraud in a system, the computer is fed with a very large sample of fraudulent and non-fraudulent data and asked to learn the signs that a given transaction may fall into. After a thorough training, the system is thus able to spot a fraudulent transaction based on the sign learned in the training process. This is normally the case when an email asks you to confirm whether you are the person who logged in your email using a different PC elsewhere.
Video games
This area has widely made use of the artificial intelligence. The characteristics of learning human behaviors, responding to stimuli and reaction in a predictive manner are used to produce these video games. This is one of the areas where artificial intelligence is rapidly growing.
Home devices
A variety of smart home devices are now using intelligence to learn the behavioral patterns of a human being and eventually contributing in decision-making through a prediction method. For instance, a thermostat at home may adjust to settings that will increase your convenience while using it and thus end up saving your energy.Nowadays, there are a lot of artificial intelligence apps for your Android and iPhone too.
Security and surveillance
Naturally, people get easily bored in the process of keeping track of multiple activities taking place. The use of artificial intelligence simplifies this using a trained computer that works in harmony with cameras. The security algorithms used in training the computer are efficient enough to raise an alarm that will alert human security in the event of a threat.
Conclusion
Overall, it is apparent that artificial intelligence is the pinnacle of human imagination. It has allowed humans to develop machines, robots, or computer systems that can do things associated with human intelligence with greater efficiency. Consequently, it has been applied in different areas of life such as fraud detection, security, surveillance, and video games among others.
Also Read: What is Machine Learning?