Knowledge MaxxingArtificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is software that performs tasks normally associated with human judgment, such as recognizing patterns or making predictions, rather than following a fixed set of manual rules.
What matters
The label covers a huge range of techniques, from simple statistical rules to large neural networks. What makes a system count as AI is that it derives its behavior from data or learned patterns rather than a programmer manually specifying every case.
Example
A spam filter that learns from thousands of labeled emails which patterns predict spam, instead of a human writing an explicit list of banned words, is a basic form of AI.
Common misconception
Not every automated feature is AI. A thermostat following a fixed temperature rule is automation, not intelligence, however 'smart' its marketing sounds.
Recall question
What distinguishes an AI system from a plain rule-based automation script?