Artificial Intelligence - Key Points

• Intelligent behavior can be taken as an outward sign of a conscious being. It is thought that the phenomenon of consciousness itself is some kind of emergent property of complex neuronal dynamics.
• We can operationally define an `intelligent' machine by its ability to pass the Turing test.
• A computer can be said to have passed this test if a human questioner is unable to determine from repeated questions of any kind, whether he or she is talking to another person or a machine.
• A counter argument, which usually goes under the name of the Chinese room experiment attempts to prove that passing the Turing test is not a fair measure of whether a machine is truly intelligent.
• This may not apply to neural networks since they are not `rule-based systems'.
• Attempts to build self-organizing networks have met with some success.
• These use a `competitive' process to set up the network connections. They can, in principle, tackle a much wider range of problem than Perceptron or Hopfield models
• The prospects for the future look fascinating!