ABSTRACT
An introduction to some of the fundamental ideas of artificial intelligence (AI) was given in Chapter 2. The current chapter expands on those ideas to provide an overview of the techniques of AI and to give guidance on the considerable amount of jargon that is used in what is a huge and expanding research field. However, the main aim of the chapter is to concentrate on those aspects of AI that are particularly relevant to the development of intelligent machines that operate in real-time in the real world. This implies that such machines must make intelligent decisions based on sensor data from the environment, and effect some change either to their own state or the world around them by means of actuation as a consequence. There is currently a large base of active AI research, largely centred in university computer science departments, where the emphasis is more concerned with the solution of closed logic problems, such as formal proofs, within the computer itself. Such work has only marginal relevance to the type of intelligent systems that are considered here, and indeed it can be argued that such reasoning plays a fairly insignificant role in the way that humans operate effectively in a complex and unstructured world.
