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Define: artificial intelligence

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Alas, that term "artificial intelligence" gets bandied about a lot in business and non-business circles. So what exactly do we mean by "AI"? And to make things more complicated - what do people mean when they say "machine learning"?  A no-nonsense guide to AI Quite simply: AI is a general label for all of the computerised systems that perform tasks in an approximation of human intelligence. You know that magic rice cooker? It might have a heuristic (fancy way of saying "a rule of thumb") on "how long to keep the water on the boil". It's not quite as sexy as "machine learning", but this approximation of how grandma used to cook the rice is as simple as saying, "use two cups of water for every one cup of rice".  The next level down is "machine learning", and I actually prefer to split this down into supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. These are statistical methods where