Hello!

Ai or artificial intelligence is a big part of computer science.

It got a lot of attention in the 1960-1970 when people thought that with the invention of the computer and its fast developement the human mind could be beaten in every aspect there is.

After many universities opened up artificial laboratories and hired alot of ai professors it turned out to be way more complex and hard to invent intelligence than they thought. Many people lost their jobs and for a while ai was ignored by the public. Thats what some people call ai winter .

Of course thinking machines are still a very nice thing to have so research never really stopped and is picking up speed and money in the 90 again.

Today we divide ai into two categories. Strong and weak ai.

Strong ai is the kind of ai you are thinking about. A general problem solver.Its smarter than humans and generally the point of attention in a lot of sf movies.

Weak ai is dealing with smaller very specific problems. For example your navigation system is considered a weak ai. Pathfinding is actually an intelligent skill and very hard sometimes.

I will list some fields of artificial intelligence now:

Game ai (think battlefield or LoL)

Navigation systems

In some places traffic lights are controlled by an ai.

Autopilot in planes could be labeled as ai.

Ai in general is not all knowing and not evil or at the edge of becoming sentiend like in most movies.

Ai is simply a programm that solves a complex problem. Important note here: one complex problem.

It's a weird time. Those in the know prefer the term "machine learning" but a lot of others don't care how a program got its result, they assume it is "AI" because it took something a human made and turned it into something they could believe a human made.