Artificial Intelligence has always been a moving target. Once Kasparov was defeated by IBM's big blue, it was no longer called Artificial Intelligence. When defined as the ability for a machine to perform tasks that would require expert knowledge and ability if performed by a human, Artificial Intelligence is most certainly here. As Google assimilates the world's knowledge as expressed in web pages, e-mails and documents into a live memory, providing instant responses to queries for knowledge expressed in human language, it is often meekly referred to as a 'smart search algorithm'. We would beg to differ and call it a form of Artificial Intelligence. But enough marketing for Google. Aivolution makes these techniques and technologies available to you and your applications.
Many of the techniques that are used in Artificial Intelligence, are not easily accessible to the vast majority of software professionals. One reason is that the commercial potential of innovation in this space is so significant that implementations are hidden and protected behind proprietary walls.
It is little known that Artificial Intelligence is an active field of study that has yielded very important methodologies and technologies that have found their way in mainstream information technology. Object-Orientation, to name just one, is a brainchild of Artificial Intelligence research and came about in just one of many attempts to more adequately represent knowledge of a problem domain in a machine executable format. Many other areas of AI research have started to become mainstream: natural language processing, speech recognition, speech synthesis, semantic networks, optical character recognition, artificial neural networks, to name a few. Many other areas are gold mines with paradigms whose potential are just waiting to be mined.
What is exciting, is that many of the great AI ideas that were developed some decades ago but were impractical due to computational resource constraints, have now become practical solutions to a great number of problems. In the early nineties, Aivolution's founder developed a Neural Network Development Shell, in which artificial evolution was put to use on the design of artificial neural networks. Computer memory limitations prevented this system from being useful beyond trivial learning problems. Now, as memory in a low end laptop exceeds the memory capability of the mainframes of the day, new possibilities abound.
Great strides have also been made in what is possible in a graphical user interfaces, and data storage and distributed computing have become a commodity. A great deal of intelligence can be packed into a single drop-down user-interface, automatically suggesting the name of a street from millions of streets as you type the first characters, based on knowledge as to where you are located and knowledge as to what you have searched for before.
