Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence:Simulated Embodied Agents :Simulated Embodied Agents :Simulated Embodied Agents :Simulated Embodied Agents

Abstract

Probably everybody has heard of Artificial Intelligence (AI for short), but relatively few people have a really good idea of what the term really means. My purpose here is to introduce a few of the basic ideas behind AI, and to try and offer a means by which people can come to grips with the current state of the art in the field. Roughly speaking, Artificial Intelligence is the study of man-made computational devices and systems which can be made to act in a manner which we would be inclined to call intelligent. The birth of the field can be traced back to the early 1950s. The fundamental strategy which lay behind all these successes led to the proposal of what is known as the Physical Symbol Systems Hypothesis, by Newell and Simon in 1976. The Physical Symbol System Hypothesis amounts to a distillation of the theory which lay behind much of the work which had gone on up until that date and was proposed as a general scientific hypothesis. Newell and Simon (1976: p. 41) wrote; "A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action." Although there has been a great deal of controversy about exactly how this hypothesis should be interpreted, there are two important conclusions which have been drawn from it. The first conclusion is that computers are physical symbol systems, in the relevant sense, and thus there are grounds (should the hypothesis be correct) to believe that they should be able to exhibit intelligence. The second conclusion is that, as we humans also are intelligent, we too must be physical symbol systems and thus are in a significant sense, similar to computers.