Artificial intelligence
Text written by: Andrea Švob, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Rijeka
Artificial intelligence is a new field of science that was founded in 1956 during the “Dartmouth Conference“ that lasted for two months and was held in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. The conference gathered 10 scientists from the field of automation, neural networks and experts that study intelligence. They founded a new field and called it Artificial Intelligence. The main objective of artificial intelligence is to construct systems that behave intelligently. Mathematicians who deal with artificial intelligence want to answer the following question: how to design a system that can learn, draw conclusions about the world around them, understand natural language and perform various tasks that require a human type of intelligence. The main idea of mathematicians in artificial intelligence field is to create a system that behaves rationally.
Algorithms, methods and the development of an artificially intelligent systems (which behaves rationally) uses many mathematical tools. One of the prominent areas of mathematics used in artificial intelligence is graph theory. Many problems of artificial intelligence can be modeled precisely through graph theory, namely searching for optimal solution, playing various computer games, developing smart vacuum cleaners or lawn mowers. These are just some examples of systems that work on the principle of graph theory algorithms. In addition to graph theory, key areas of mathematics in artificial intelligence are probability theory and linear algebra. Systems that help in the detection of various diseases, detection of unwanted messages, etc. are just some of the examples that are based on these areas.
One of the basic tools of artificial intelligence consists of methods and algorithms of mathematics, therefore, mathematicians are key scientists and experts in the field of artificial intelligence.