Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems with the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experiences.

Is artificial intelligence good for society? Learn the pros and cons of the debate.

Intelligence is the ability to learn and to deal with new situations. When a computer or a robot solves a problem or uses language, it may seem to be intelligent. However, this type of intelligence is different from human intelligence. It is called artificial intelligence, or AI.

Take a short quiz to see how much you know about artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence - Machine Learning, Robotics, Algorithms: AI research follows two distinct, and to some extent competing, methods, the symbolic (or “top-down”) approach and the connectionist (or “bottom-up”) approach. The top-down approach seeks to replicate intelligence by analyzing cognition independent of the biological structure of the brain, in terms of the processing of ...

This article covers the history of artificial intelligence from its beginnings with the work of Alan Turing to advancements at the turn of the 21st century.

Explore the fact-checked online encyclopedia from Encyclopaedia Britannica with hundreds of thousands of objective articles, biographies, videos, and images from experts.

Artificial intelligence - Machine Learning, Robotics, Algorithms: What Do You Think? Explore the ProCon debate Artificial general intelligence (AGI), or strong AI—that is, artificial intelligence that aims to duplicate human intellectual abilities—remains controversial and out of reach. The difficulty of scaling up AI’s modest achievements cannot be overstated. However, this lack of ...

Artificial intelligence - Reasoning, Algorithms, Automation: AI and Your Money Artificial intelligence is changing how we interact online, how we manage our finances, and even how we work. Learn more with Britannica Money. To reason is to draw inferences appropriate to the situation. Inferences are classified as either deductive or inductive. An example of the former is, “Fred must be in ...

John McCarthy, American mathematician and computer scientist who was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI); his research involved the formalization of commonsense knowledge. He coined the term ‘artificial intelligence’ in 1955 and created the computer programming language LISP in 1958.