William John Teahan - Artificial Intelligence Agents And Environments

Artificial Intelligence is a complex, yet intriguing, subject. If we were to use an analogy to describe the study of Artificial Intelligence, then we could perhaps liken it to a landscape, whose ever changing picture is being shaped and reshaped by man over time (in order to highlight how it is continually evolving).

Or we could liken it to the observation of desert sands, which continually shift with the winds (to point out its dynamic nature). Yet another analogy might be to liken it to the ephemeral nature of clouds, also controlled by the prevailing winds, but whose substance is impossible to grasp, being forever out of reach (to show the difficulty in defining it).

These analogies are rich in metaphor, and are close to the truth in some respects, but also obscure the truth in other respects.

Natural language is the substance with which this book is written, and metaphor and analogy are important devices that we, as users and producers of language ourselves, are able to understand and create. Yet understanding language itself and how it works still poses one of the greatest challenges in
the field of Artificial Intelligence. Other challenges have included beating the world champion at chess, driving a car in the middle of a city, performing a surgical operation, writing funny stories and so on; and this variety is why Artificial Intelligence is such an interesting subject.