Classification of the most common artificial intelligence techniques

Artificial intelligence has a very vague definition: a bunch of software techniques that simulate human behavior. The most famous and objective definition is the one based on the so-called Turing test. Software passes the Turing test if a human speaking with it either through a keyboard or through an audio device is not able to understand if they are speaking with a machine or with another human. Needless to say, nowadays no software can pass the Turing test!

Therefore, at the moment, AI software is just able to mimic human behavior in very particular circumstances and in very limited domains of knowledge.

In the remainder of this section, we will describe the main AI techniques, each in a separate subsection. We will limit this to artificial reasoning techniques. Perception techniques (computer vision, language, and speech understanding) will be described shortly, in the next section about machine learning...