Can the machines think like the human beings? Can they have intelligence? Allan Turing, British mathematician, developed a machine during the World War II to decode the messages of the Germans. Later after the war, they developed Turing Test to measure the intelligence of the machines. It was used to decide whether machines and computers can think like the human beings. Turing test was simple. A man on the other side of a partition asks written questions to the computer and a human being. The questioner has to identify on the basis of written answers whether the human being or computer has answered, if they could not be identified it means the computer is answering as good as the human being. It means the computer has started thinking before answering. It passes the test of artificial intelligence. It was a practical method.
The term artificial intelligence was first used in 1956 in a workshop conducted by John McCarthy and that paved the way for the research in AI.
What is intelligence? It means to understand the environment around us. It means to relate things. It means to think and then learn. All this is used to make a right decision for action. In the field of AI, all this is expected of a computer. We visualise a humanoid with intelligence when we consider AI, of course, robotics too is included in this. Then in games, we have to decide the strategy taking into consideration several factors, e.g. chess, poker etc. Here too AI can be used. Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition and Computer Vision are the branches of AI.
AI is applied in driverless autonomous cars, computerized recapitulation of a book, drawing, story writing etc. It is used to identify spam e-mail and to diagnose diseases. Many websites interact through chatbots .
AI uses computer science, statistics, language, philosophy and psychology. Machine Learning (ML) has become the buzz word. The computer here is given data inputs which makes it learn on its own. It analyses and decides Deep learning is a part of ML. It mimics the neural network of the brain. It is used mainly to comprehend language and analyze it.