With its recent gain in popularity, a lot of things have been called “Artificial Intelligence”. But what is it anyway? According to Wikipedia, it’s “intelligence demonstrated by machines”, but does such a thing exist? At time of writing, they are 4 main types of AI development algorithms.

• Expert systems defines a category of computer programs that are specifically designed to do a task using prior human knowledge. Software engineers work closely with a domain expert to build the program, that will act in a predicable way, like the domain expert would have done if he or she had the same processing power. For example, Deep Blue is an expert system designed by IBM to play chess that won against the former world champion Kasparov.

The drawback of the expert system is that it’s tough to maintain (because it requires an expert on the domain at hand) and it’s costly.