Artificial Intelligence - Weak AI
There are two fundamental types of AI - Weak AI (otherwise known as rules-based AI) and Strong AI (known as machine learning).
Don't let the word weak confuse you - this sort of AI is still very useful. But it's also not what people usually think of when you discuss Artificial Intelligence.
A weak AI is simply a set of rules that you apply to your inputs to arrive at the outputs.
So in our water temperature example, it would be very easy to construct a weak AI by simply deciding on a temperature threshold.
If Temperature > 75, then Too Hot should be 1, otherwise Too Hot should be 0.
Advantages
- Are easy to understand
- Are extremely consistent
- Perform very efficiently
Disadvantages
- Are based on assumptions
- Are very inflexible
- Need to be hand-made by people
- Become incredibly difficult to create and maintain as complexity grows
The last two disadvantages are why the field of strong AI - machine learning - arose.
If you imagine a more complicated AI, you'll see that hand-making individual rules for each combination of possibilities is a dauting task - and as the number of inputs increase, it quickly becomes an impossible task.