The ability of computers to “think” in ways similar to human beings. Examples might be reasoning, adaptation, decision making, and learning from mistakes. At present, artificial intelligence has a long way to go before machines can be considered truly “smart.” Present day “AI” does allow machines to mimic certain simple human thought processes, but can’t begin to match the quickness and complexity of the brain.

Examples of AI problems are computer vision (building a system that can understand images as well as a human) and natural language processing (building a system that can understand and speak a human language as well as a human). These may appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (1993) to solve them have foundered on the amount of context information and “intelligence” they seem to require. The term is often used as a selling point, e.g. to describe programming that drives the behaviour of computer characters in a game. This is often no more intelligent than “Kill any humans you see; keep walking; avoid solid objects; duck if a human with a gun can see you”.