People conversing with robots like they're part of the human race, computers interacting with humans, following their orders and performing a wide array of tasks, all of this and more is associated with artificial intelligence. There have been futuristic visions as well portraying robots rebelling against their human creators and starting widespread wars.
In short, Artificial Intelligence is the study and design of intelligent agents which basically are systems capable of perceiving their environment and taking actions maximizing their chances of success. While this concept may seem like something from a sci-fi movie, Artificial Intelligence is already widely used. Examples in our everyday use include OCR (Optical Character Recognition), speech and speaker recognition. The business sector also uses automated systems that generate credit checks of people and prepare profiles of the best clients. Unfortunately systems based on Artificial Intelligence may and probably will be used for greater surveillance and information gathering purposes.
Another practical use of artificial intelligence is machine translation of texts. Fortunately, for those of us in the translation business those machine produced translations cannot match human translations. Also, languages evolve constantly. New words and new meanings of words keep emerging all the time and translation software not only cannot keep up with those evolutions, but it is helpless when it comes to a wide variety of cultural and linguistic nuances. The programs do not understand the meaning of texts, the way that humans do.
It might appear strange, but there are actually certain things that are very difficult for computers, while they are relatively easy for humans to learn. Like the ancient Chinese game of "Go". Also known as Weiqi (Chinese) and Baduk in Korean – this game can be easily taught to children. In fact, according to the most commonly known story about its origins, it was Chinese Emperor Yao who invented this game in order to educate his son Danzhu. This game taught him all the skills he needed in order to become a successful strategist and leader.
Research continues and there are ongoing Artificial Intelligence projects on the web. One of them is called Cleverbot. It is a web application that employs an artificial intelligence algorithm to converse with humans. The responses that Cleverbot gives are not fed into it, they are selected from human phrases in previous conversations. I decided to give it a try and submitted my question to the Cleverbot. It was:" Which human language do you find to be most difficult to learn?
The answer? Hmmm……………. I have waited for 2 days, but so far was not honored with one. Maybe it got lost somewhere in cyberspace? Should I get one, I will make another post on this blog with an answer. But for now, I will go and have a go at Go. Try to get a machine translation of that last sentence!!
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