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Department of Information Technology

Artificial intelligence

How much longer can you stay ahead of your computer?

"What is intelligence?" is a deep, philosophical question. The topic of this course is more practical: How can we make computers perform tasks that - up to now - are difficult for computers? Tasks that require an 'intelligent' approach, because computing power alone is not enough.Even before the first computer was built, it was thought of as possibly intelligent. Obviously, computers would talk - a three-year old child can talk. Playing chess, now that would be intelligent! AI has fulfilled that promise, and many others. This course is about the successes of AI, and how they work. However, knowing how they work takes away part of the magic, or 'intelligence'.
Artificial intelligence requires knowledge representation and reasoning. There are many different approaches. In logic, knowledge consists of facts and rules, clearly visible and separate from reasoning. In neural networks, knowledge is implicit and entangled in the reasoning process.Reasoning is not a straightforward computation. It is a search: making guesses, trying different solutions. At the heart of AI is heuristic search: methods that try to make 'intelligent' guesses.Nowadays many applications contain AI, often in disguise. Google finds relevant search results. You can talk to a computer and book a railway ticket. The monsters in computer games come right at you. Can you stay ahe Prerequisites: 120 hp, at least 20 in mathematics and 30 in computer science. Among this, a second course in programming

Updated  2012-04-24 17:08:49 by Roland Bol.