Ashraf Mikhail Website

Computers do what we told to do and they do it fast even faster than the human brain but can they perform independently and develop it self? Some answer could be finding in Artificial Inelegant (AI) as first named in the 1950th.
AI is a large field considered in many areas. The goal of the AI is to build agents that behave inelegantly. Looking at the concept of intelligent agents in the software and hardware perspective as device responds to stimuli from its environment or a program communicating over the internet. (Brookshear 2006 p 452) (Times 1981)

Hardware intelligent agents
The intelligent agents have sensor to receive data from their environment and actuators to affect their environment, but the central process units are not capable of perceiving the level of the human minds acting as intelligent agents that is why AI researcher has been looking for alternatives computer architectures as artificial neural network, which constructed from the processing units. The processing unit is a simple device produce an output of 1 or 0 depending on the effective input value.
To construct a machine with constructive memory is a long time goal of AI researcher to reach the concept in the human mind that can retrieve information related to the topic of consideration. (Brookshear 2006 p 480-486)
Example the biological computer created by US scientist lead by Professor Bill Ditto - Georgia Institute of Technology by building a device can do simple mathematic operations as addition not doing what we told them to do as the conventional computer but rather fixable computer that can solve the problem. They use the leech neurons with the capability to form their own connections from one to another. (BBC New 1999)

Software intelligent agents
Finding abstractions for languages, methodologies and toolkits for modelling, verifying, validating, and finally implementing applications of complex software or also called the intelligent agents has been the subject of many researcher for the past 20 years. An intelligent agent is a computer system, situated in some environment that is capable of flexible autonomous actions in order to meet its design objectives. Situate means that the agent receives sensory input from its environment and that it can perform actions, which change the environment in some way as mention above in the machine intelligent.
The system should be able to act without the direct intervention of humans and that it should have control over its own actions and internal state. (Sterling 2004)
The implementation of intelligent agent used in many areas as:
-    Game
-    Information system management (databases) (analysing sound and image files)
-    Verification system
-    Learning system

I believe that these area has been growing slow since the  1950th but will change after 9/11 with new attention of fighting terror even terror is not most challenging AI; however there are a plenty of money put into AI research from government to fight terrorist and now I will look forward to your input in this area.

Reference:

• J. Glenn Brookshear, 2006. Computer Science 9 ed.
• Times, 9 Feb 1981. Kenneth Owen. Computer get brighter and brighter
• BBC New. 2 Jun 1999  Biological computer born
• LEON STERLING, 2004 Cambridge University. Logic-based specification languages for intelligent software agents