Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way back into the mainstream of corporate technology, this time at the core of business systems which are providing competitive advantage in all sorts of industries, including electronics, manufacturing, software, medicine, entertainment, engineering and communications. Since the earliest days of computing, we have envisioned machines that could go beyond our own ability to solve problems—intelligent machines. We have generated many computing devices that can solve mathematical problems of enormous complexity, but mainly these too are merely ?calculators. ? They are preprogrammed to do exactly what we want them to do. They accept input and generate the correct output. Designed to leverage the capabilities of humans rather than replace them, today's AI technology enables an extraordinary array of applications that forge new connections among people, computers, knowledge, and the physical world. Some AI enabled applications are information distribution and retrieval, database mining, product design, manufacturing, inspection, training, user support, surgical planning, resource scheduling, and complex resource management.

1. American Association for Artificial Intelligence http://www. aaai. org/
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5. Figure 1: courtesy Dr. Bill Hodson
6. Figure 2: A neural network: Wikipedia

Expert Systems Fuzzy Logics Genetic Algorithms Neural Network Intelligence.