Chapter 1 WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Lee Sedol stared down at a wooden game board covered in black and white stones He was one of the best players in the world of an ancient Chinese game called Go But he had just lost the game to a computer program called AlphaGo Go is the oldest board game that people still play It started in China more than twenty five hundred years ago
Lee Sedol right studies the Go board The man on the left is placing a stone on the board for AlphaGo AlphaGo is an artificial intelligence AI program Al allows a computer to learn make decisions and react as humans do Al programs can learn to process information on their own Human programmers build computers with Al in different ways
Machine Learning How do you tell a dog from a cat When you see a dog you can instantly tell what kind of animal it is because you have seen dogs before You see the shape of its ears its nose and its tail and you know that you are looking at a dog Cats and dogs share many features such as ears and noses You can tell a cat from a dog because of the differences in those features
Programmers create Al that can learn That way the Al can react to situations programmers can't predict Al programs work the same way It would be very complicated for a programmer to write code with all the steps for recognizing dogs Instead programmers use machine learning so the computer can teach itself the differences between dogs and other animals A programmer using machine learning might show an Al thousands of images of dogs The Al analyzes and compares the images Later if the computer sees a new picture of a dog the Al will recognize it
