What all goes in learning Artificial Intelligence?

Question

I am an undergrad student (in third year), and I recently developed interest in learning AI. I am quite fascinated about making machines intelligent.
Could anyone please help me with the initial process? I mean, how shall I begin, and then which language shall I learn, etc. I apologize if my question sounds dumb.
Well, I am good at logical reasoning (i.e I frame good ligics) and I also have good knowledge of C and Java.
I would be even more thankful if you could also suggest me a few good universities (in US/UK/Europe) for doing my masters in this field.

Thanks a lot. Avanish

Answer 1

Try to mimic your day, in code. Think about all the decisions you encounter every second, and try to imagine putting that into a program.

Answer 2

Start by taking a class on AI, or googling for tutorials

I know it sounds obvious, but that's because it is.

Answer 3

MIT's Free Online Undergraduate Computer Science Course on Artificial Intelligence

http://educhoices.org/articles/Artificial_Intelligence_OpenCourseWare_MITs_Free_Online_Undergraduate_Computer_Science_Course_on_Artificial_Intelligence.html

'Artificial Intelligence' introduces the fundamental concepts of 'Artificial Intelligence' (AI) as applied to computer software. 'Artificial Intelligence' is upper-level undergraduate OpenCourseWare offered by Dixie State College of Utah. It is part of a Bachelor of Science program in Computer and Information Technology.

Answer 4

Besides the obviousness of taking AI classes and reading AI books, try to get really good in Statistics and Probability. Most methods in AI use lots of it.

Also, just think about AI as being the leading edge of algorithms. Think that the algorithms that we take for granted today once were the leading edge (and thus AI) of computing theory.

Answer 5

Before anything, and certainly before "signing up" for a master's program in any subject, you need to complete a few classes (if only online classes), read a few books, and generally tinker with the very broad domain that is AI.

Once you become more familiar with AI at large and with particular areas of interest within AI, you can then "shop" for a university which will offer opportunities in the relevant fields.

Also, while completing your Bachelor's degree, do focus on subjects outside of Computer Science (in addition to maybe learning maybe LISP or a functional language). Many areas of mathematics come to mind (Statistics or graph theory, for example), also intro to linguistics, biology/ecology courses or labs related to animal behavior...

Answer 6

The core of AI is really graph search. A lot of intelligent behavior can essentially be boiled down to searching through a decision tree for the most effective solution (it gets more complicated if an opponent is involved). So, I'd suggest learning pathfinding/search first (depth-first, breadth-first searches, uniform cost search, and then more informed searches and in particular A*, which is invaluable and has a lot of very good resources (some of which should be linked to at the bottom of that wikipedia page)).

Really, though, your university should have a course on AI. At third year, it should also be accessible (though I'm sure some topics wait until fourth year). School is as good a place to start learning something as any, and worse than others.

As for programming languages, I've heard it said that Prolog is good for this sort of thing, and seen it used in AI courses and so on. It's certainly not necessary (at all) for understanding how to do pathfinding and various other subjects in AI. You can use Java for these, or even C (it wouldn't be all that pleasant, but it's done all the time). Or you could take the opportunity to learn whatever language is the focus of whatever guide you use to learn various subjects in AI (e.g. Prolog or Python may be used).

Answer 7

In artificial intelligence you will mostly have to do with:

• Searching algorithms (BFS, DFS, A* and more) and good techniques to use them (heuristics, constraints)
• Logic (propositional logic, first order logic, and others)
• Probabilities and Statistics (mostly in Machine Learning)
• Maybe also optimization theory

A great book to learn about AI is

• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig

You can create programs in many languages, but i would suggest you to learn:

• Prolog
• Lisp
• Maybe Python
• Matlab (for Machine learning, very good for statistics and any mathematical operation)

Answer 8

Actually you can use any language you want but some like prolog and lisp are very popular in ai. i personally think that the most important part of ai is nlp, it is important for machines to understand human language.