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artifi[e86,jmc]	Artificial Intelligence for Hopcroft study

	Artificial intelligence (AI) is the name of a branch of science
and also the corresponding technology.  Its main scientific problem is the
characterization of intelligent behavior as a computational process.  This
also involves the creation of computer programs that exhibit intelligent
behavior or, in some approaches, the creation of hardware that exhibits
intelligent behavior.

	Sustained scientific work on AI dates from the 1950s with the
Dartmouth Summer Project on AI and the formation of research groups at
Carnegie-Mellon University and M.I.T.  In the 1960s these were joined by
groups at Stanford University, SRI International and the University of
Edinburgh.  More recently AI research has spread throughout the U.S.  and
the world.  In the 1970s the basic research work was joined by efforts
primarily motivated by applications --- the development of {\it expert
systems}.

	Several approaches to AI have been pursued.

	1. It is possible to begin with human psychology --- making experiments
on human problem solving and attempting to characterize the
intellectual processes used by the subjects.  Newell and Simon
pioneered here.

	2. It is possible to begin with physiology and to work with
networks of neurons.

	3. It is possible to begin with an objective study of the
common sense world and the problems it presents for a being with
given kinds of goals and given observational and computational resources.
This approach subdivides according to whether logic as a means of describing
what is known about the world is emphasized or whether one
regards knowledge as essentially procedural to be described directly
in some kind of programming language.

	In this connection it should be noted that AI research has
pioneered flexible programming languages beginning with the Newell
and Simon IPLs, and continuing with McCarthy's LISP and Colmerauer's
Prolog.

	4. Some AI researchers have based their work on beginning
with an initially unintelligent machine or program that learns to
be more intelligent by experience and training.

	The most steadily active approaches have been the psychological
approach and the objective problem-solving approach.  While the other
approaches have met difficulties which have discouraged some researchers,
no-one have proved them necessarily unfruitful, and they are revived
from time to time by people with new ideas for implementing them.

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lead in to logic and vision