In computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals. Leading AI textbooks define the field as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is often used to describe machines that mimic "cognitive" functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem solving".
Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Despite these accomplishments, he was not fully recognised in his home country during his lifetime, due to his homosexuality, and because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act.
Kevin Warwick FIET, FCGI, is a British engineer and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University in the United Kingdom. He is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, and has also done research concerning robotics.
Artificial neural networks (ANN) or connectionist systems are computing systems vaguely inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. Such systems "learn" to perform tasks by considering examples, generally without being programmed with task-specific rules. For example, in image recognition, they might learn to identify images that contain cats by analyzing example images that have been manually labeled as "cat" or "no cat" and using the results to identify cats in other images. They do this without any prior knowledge of cats, for example, that they have fur, tails, whiskers and cat-like faces. Instead, they automatically generate identifying characteristics from the examples that they process.
A stored-program computer is a computer that stores program instructions in electronic memory. This contrasts with machines where the program instructions are stored on plugboards or similar mechanisms.
Hypercomputation or super-Turing computation refers to models of computation that can provide outputs that are not Turing-computable. For example, a machine that could solve the halting problem would be a hypercomputer; so too would one that can correctly evaluate every statement in Peano arithmetic.
In computer science, evolutionary computation is a family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution, and the subfield of artificial intelligence and soft computing studying these algorithms. In technical terms, they are a family of population-based trial and error problem solvers with a metaheuristic or stochastic optimization character.
Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his studies of consciousness and his controversial contention that consciousness originates from quantum states in neural microtubules. He is the lead organizer of the Science of Consciousness conference.
Geoffrey Everest Hinton is an English Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. Since 2013 he divides his time working for Google and the University of Toronto. In 2017, he cofounded and became the Chief Scientific Advisor of the Vector Institute in Toronto.
In computer science and quantum physics, the Church–Turing–Deutsch principle is a stronger, physical form of the Church–Turing thesis formulated by David Deutsch in 1985. The principle states that a universal computing device can simulate every physical process.
Generative science is an area of research that explores the natural world and its complex behaviours. It explores ways "to generate apparently unanticipated and infinite behaviour based on deterministic and finite rules and parameters reproducing or resembling the behavior of natural and social phenomena". By modelling such interactions, it can suggest that properties exist in the system that had not been noticed in the real world situation. An example field of study is how unintended consequences arise in social processes.
Christof Koch is a German-American neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural bases of consciousness. He is the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology.
A neural network is a network or circuit of neurons, or in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of real biological neurons, or an artificial neural network, for solving artificial intelligence (AI) problems. The connections of the biological neuron are modeled as weights. A positive weight reflects an excitatory connection, while negative values mean inhibitory connections. All inputs are modified by a weight and summed. This activity is referred as a linear combination. Finally, an activation function controls the amplitude of the output. For example, an acceptable range of output is usually between 0 and 1, or it could be −1 and 1.
An artificial brain is software and hardware with cognitive abilities similar to those of the animal or human brain.
Brian Jack Copeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, and author of books on the computing pioneer Alan Turing.
Reservoir computing is a framework for computation derived from recurrent neural network theory that maps input signals into higher dimensional computational spaces through the dynamics of a fixed, non-linear system called a reservoir. After the input signal is fed into the reservoir, which is treated as a "black box," a simple readout mechanism is trained to read the state of the reservoir and map it to the desired output. The first key benefit of this framework is that training is performed only at the readout stage, as the reservoir dynamics are fixed. The second is that the computational power of naturally available systems, both classical and quantum mechanical, can be utilized to reduce the effective computational cost.
The BioWall is a bio-inspired computing surface made of several thousand electronic modules which can be seen as artificial molecules. Each of these modules contains a programmable electronic circuit, a touch sensor and a display composed of 64 LEDs. As a result, each module enables the visitor to communicate with the surface by touching it with his finger, calculates its new status and indicates it immediately on a coloured display.
Jonathan Andrew Crowcroft, FRS, FREng is the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and the Chair of the Programme Committee at the Alan Turing Institute.
Andrew Adamatzky is a British computer scientist, who is a Director of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory and Professor in Unconventional Computing at the Department of Computer Science and Creative Technology, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom.
Golly is a tool for the simulation of cellular automata. It is free open-source software written by Andrew Trevorrow and Tomas Rokicki; it can be scripted using Lua or Python. It includes a hashlife algorithm that can simulate the behavior of very large structured or repetitive patterns such as Paul Rendell's Life universal Turing machine, and that is fast enough to simulate some patterns for 232 or more time units. It also includes a large library of predefined patterns in Conway's Game of Life and other rules.
