Overview of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that aims to create computer software that emulates human intelligence. John McCarthy (2007), who coined the term in 1955, defines it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” AI software emulates many aspects of human intelligence, such as reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, communication, perception, and the ability to move and manipulate objects. There are a number of tools that AI uses to emulate these areas of human intelligence. In this chapter, we will look at a set of these tools loosely called “machine learning.” Machine learning classifiers take as input empirical data and predict the features of the data. As an example, consider anticancer drug design. One method of anticancer drug design is to create compounds and then test how well they kill cancer cells in laboratory petri dishes. Thousands of compounds may be created and tested before one is found that kills cancer cells. Clearly, the process of creating the compound and then testing it is a lengthy one. Machine learning has been applied to speed this process up by identifying