What is AI? / Branches of AI

Q. What are the branches of AI?

A. Here's a list, but some branches are surely missing, because no-one has identified them yet. Some of these may be regarded as concepts or topics rather than full branches.

Logical AI: What a program knows about the world in general the facts of the specific situation in which it must act, and its goals are all represented by sentences of some mathematical logical language. The program decides what to do by inferring that certain actions are appropriate for achieving its goals. The first article proposing this was [McC59]. [McC89] is a more recent summary. [McC96b] lists some of the concepts involved in logical aI. [Sha97] is an important text.
Search: AI programs often examine large numbers of possibilities, e.g. moves in a chess game or inferences by a theorem proving program. Discoveries are continually made about how to do this more efficiently in various domains.
Pattern recognition: When a program makes observations of some kind, it is often programmed to compare what it sees with a pattern. For example, a vision program may try to match a pattern of eyes and a nose in a scene in order to find a face. More complex patterns, e.g. in a natural language text, in a chess position, or in the history of some event are also studied. These more complex patterns require quite different methods than do the simple patterns that have been studied the most.
Representation: Facts about the world have to be represented in some way. Usually languages of mathematical logic are used.
Inference: From some facts, others can be inferred. Mathematical logical deduction is adequate for some purposes, but new methods of non-monotonic inference have been added to logic since the 1970s. The simplest kind of non-monotonic reasoning is default reasoning in which a conclusion is to be inferred by default, but the conclusion can be withdrawn if there is evidence to the contrary. For example, when we hear of a bird, we man infer that it can fly, but this conclusion can be reversed when we hear that it is a penguin. It is the possibility that a conclusion may have to be withdrawn that constitutes the non-monotonic character of the reasoning. Ordinary logical reasoning is monotonic in that the set of conclusions that can the drawn from a set of premises is a monotonic increasing function of the premises. Circumscription is another form of non-monotonic reasoning.
Common sense knowledge and reasoning: This is the area in which AI is farthest from human-level, in spite of the fact that it has been an active research area since the 1950s. While there has been considerable progress, e.g. in developing systems of non-monotonic reasoning and theories of action, yet more new ideas are needed. The Cyc system contains a large but spotty collection of common sense facts.
Learning from experience: Programs do that. The approaches to AI based on connectionism and neural nets specialize in that. There is also learning of laws expressed in logic. [Mit97] is a comprehensive undergraduate text on machine learning. Programs can only learn what facts or behaviors their formalisms can represent, and unfortunately learning systems are almost all based on very limited abilities to represent information.
Planning: Planning programs start with general facts about the world (especially facts about the effects of actions), facts about the particular situation and a statement of a goal. From these, they generate a strategy for achieving the goal. In the most common cases, the strategy is just a sequence of actions.
Epistemology: This is a study of the kinds of knowledge that are required for solving problems in the world.
Ontology: Ontology is the study of the kinds of things that exist. In AI, the programs and sentences deal with various kinds of objects, and we study what these kinds are and what their basic properties are. Emphasis on ontology begins in the 1990s.
Heuristics: A heuristic is a way of trying to discover something or an idea imbedded in a program. The term is used variously in AI. Heuristic functions are used in some approaches to search to measure how far a node in a search tree seems to be from a goal. Heuristic predicates that compare two nodes in a search tree to see if one is better than the other, i.e. constitutes an advance toward the goal, may be more useful. [My opinion].
Genetic programming: Genetic programming is a technique for getting programs to solve a task by mating random Lisp programs and selecting fittest in millions of generations. It is being developed by John Koza's group and here's a tutorial.

Go to next page on Applications of AI.