Artificial intelligence (AI, also machine intelligence, MI) is intelligence exhibited by machines, rather than humans or other animals (natural intelligence, NI). In computer science, the field of AI research defines itself as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving".
The scope of AI is disputed: as machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered as requiring "intelligence" are often removed from the definition, a phenomenon known as the AI effect, leading to the quip "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."For instance, optical character recognition is frequently excluded from "artificial intelligence", having become a routine technology. Capabilities generally classified as AI, as of 2017, include successfully understanding human speech, competing at a high level in strategic gamesystems (such as chess and Go, autonomous cars, intelligent routing in content delivery networks, military simulations, and interpreting complex data.
