Karen Hao – MIT Technology Review
What is artificial intelligence? It’s a beguilingly simple question, but one which lacks a beguilingly simple answer. There’s more than one way to approach the question, of course – Chris Yiu provides mass exemplificaiton, for example (his list had 204 entries when first linked from here in January, but has now grown to 501). Terence Eden more whimsically dives down through the etymology, while Fabio Ciucci provides a pragmatic approach based on the underlying technology.
This short post takes a different approach again – diagnose whether what you are looking at is AI by means of a simple flowchart. It’s a nice idea, despite inviting some quibbling about some of the detail (“looking for patterns in massive amounts of data” doesn’t sound like a complete account of “reasoning” to me). And it’s probably going to need a bigger piece of paper soon.