DescentBB

I'm trying to comprehend what artificial intelligence is. It's a difficult topic for me, but I'd rather know something than nothing at all.

So far, when I see coding examples I either don't understand what I'm looking at or it's nothing other than a series of "if" statements.

Assumption 1: An AI is nothing more that a loop that tests conditions, like a series of "if" statements and reacts to them or does nothing.

Assumption 2: From what I understand, a learning AI would be able to write new conditions as it's running.

I assume I'm overlooking something more complex. Can you help me figure out what that is?

How does a human brain work?

I don't know, but simulating an organic neural network, especially a human one, isn't something most examples are doing. In fact it's ground breaking. I'm not pretending I can write a speech recognition program or a self driving car.

What the majority of AIs are doing appear to be more narrow in capabilities.

Can you give me any feedback about my assumptions in the original post?

The term AI is currently used very broadly. In some problem domains, like writing an artificial opponent for tic-tac-toe, it might be a series of if's or rules. If you write a neural network that can tell the difference between a photo of a cat and a dog 80% of the time, many people would call that AI as well. I don't think there are any generally accepted rules for what AI must be though, although for some problem domains like conversation, the Turing test is often used as a benchmark. For many people the ultimate goal of AI is to make Lt. Commander Data, i.e., something that is human, so it might be something that somehow combines the techniques of a good tic-tac-toe opponent, something that can discern the difference between cats and dogs, and a fluent conversationalist, among other things.