Artificial intelligence
Defining artificial intelligence

Alan Turing wrote in 1950 "I propose to consider the question 'can machines think'?" He advised changing the question from whether a machine "thinks", to "whether or not it is possible for machinery to show intelligent behaviour". He devised the Turing test, which measures the ability of a machine to simulate human conversation. Since we can only observe the behavior of the machine, it does not matter if it is "actually" thinking or literally has a "mind". Turing notes that we can not determine these things about other people but "it is usual to have a polite convention that everyone thinks."

Russell and Norvig agree with Turing that intelligence must be defined in terms of external behavior, not internal structure. However, they are critical that the test requires the machine to imitate humans. " Aeronautical engineering texts," they wrote, "do not define the goal of their field as making 'machines that fly so exactly like pigeons that they can fool other pigeons. ' " AI founder John McCarthy agreed, writing that "Artificial intelligence is not, by definition, simulation of human intelligence".

McCarthy defines intelligence as "the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world". Another AI founder, Marvin Minsky similarly describes it as "the ability to solve hard problems". The leading AI textbook defines it as the study of agents that perceive their environment and take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. These definitions view intelligence in terms of well-defined problems with well-defined solutions, where both the difficulty of the problem and the performance of the program are direct measures of the "intelligence" of the machine—and no other philosophical discussion is required, or may not even be possible.

Another definition has been adopted by Google, a major practitioner in the field of AI. This definition stipulates the ability of systems to synthesize information as the manifestation of intelligence, similar to the way it is defined in biological intelligence.

Some authors have suggested in practice, that the definition of AI is vague and difficult to define, with contention as to whether classical algorithms should be categorised as AI, with many companies during the early 2020s AI boom using the term as a marketing buzzword, often even if they did "not actually use AI in a material way".
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