††††Artificial intelligence is the ability of a computer to think and work like a human being.
Early artificial intelligence programmes in the 1960s tried to imitate human intelligence. Today the emphasis is on what are called expert systems, where the computer can give advice, such as diagnosing an illness or interpreting the law, that comes from knowledge and information already fed into it. There is also a growing interest in knowledge-based systems, which use the encoding of human knowledge to help solve problems. A computer can be programmed to play a game of chess, for example, but a computer using knowledge-based systems in its programs can be instructed what makes a good position or what are the best tactics to adopt.
Research into artificial intelligence has also produced speech recognition systems, but at present no computer has full artificial intelligence.
