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Art of artificial intelligence


Johannesburg, 23 Jun 2011

Artificial intelligence, defined as “the study and design of intelligent agents, where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximise its chances of success” - Major AI textbooks.

The definition of insanity is carrying out the same actions continually and expecting a different result every time you do it.

Now why have I mentioned these two very different yet related definitions? Simply because artificial intelligence, or AI as the industry has coined it, is a new and exciting concept to the business world, more so for the information technology aspect of the concept. But does AI carry out the same symptoms as insanity? Let's find out.

For those that are relatively new to the concept of AI, allow me to explain. AI is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine to methods that are biologically observable. To put this in layman's terms for you, the golden thread behind AI is for a computer or program to successfully predict the actions or scenarios of the end-user, developer and or even a manager looking for a specific outcome. AI has been integrated into various different branches such as logical AI, search engines, pattern recognition, representation, inference, learning from experiences, planning and the list goes on. But let's move into the project management space now and pay particular attention to planning and lessons learnt.

Planning forms an essential part of project management, and without any plans in place, you can count the days till your project fails. Now a key aspect of AI is that it can be integrated into planning, allowing the project team to successfully predict scenarios they might face once the project has kicked-off. The one problem is that with AI, this can only be done once. One prediction. One recommendation. Not really something to plan for as a project manager, however, AI can assist the project team with lessons learnt. Once a project team member captures the data of a project, the system can then provide the user with outcomes that other projects experienced with the same or familiar objectives of this particular project.

Artificial intelligence can be found in applications such as games, speech recognition, understanding natural language, computer vision, expert systems and for the near future, online shopping behaviour. This will allow systems to predict our behaviour patterns, and the long and the short of it is to assist in decision-making and time-saving techniques. It sounds great in theory, but what are the practical aspects, like for AI?

Can there be a comparison between human intelligence and artificial intelligence? Arthur R Jensen, a leading researcher in human intelligence, suggests “as a heuristic hypothesis” that all normal humans have the same intellectual mechanisms and that differences in intelligence are related to “quantitative biochemical and physiological conditions”. I see them as speed, short-term memory, and the ability to form accurate and retrievable long-term memories. Whether Jensen is right about human intelligence, the situation in AI today is the reverse. For now that is. There is a tool currently being developed that uses AI for scenario planning and that outputs various different outcomes of each scenario. And if you find yourself in the position to wanting to change those outcomes, simply re-enter the variables of the project and custom the effects and dependencies of these variables, integrated global indices into the planning and you will have a different list of outcomes. Now imagine this tool in the mining environment. Where project managers are able to successfully predict three, five or 10 scenarios for their project and align these to global indices that would add a substantial benefit to any organisation or project.

Watch this space for more information on this fantastic tool that will use artificial intelligence and many more interesting features.

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Editorial contacts

Gareth Langley
Triniti Business Solutions
(083) 473 7450
gareth@triniti.co.za