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Is Airtificial Intelligence a science?

• PeterStuer 8y ago
  It is said that "if a discipline has science in the name it usually isn't", so AI at least passes that post. :) AI is a generic terms covering a whole spectrum of things, from 'model based philosophy' to 'advanced engineering'. You have practitioners coming to it because they want to experimentally probe computational models to gain insights into complex systems in biology/sociology/psychology etc. Then you have a whole different batch that flocks to it because they want to engineer better practical algorithms for heuristic search, adaptive control systems, high dimensional optimization etc In most universities it sprang from and is embedded in the Computer Science department, which in turn was often birthed in the science&mathematics faculty (I have heard but could not verify that this was not always the case and that in some places CS was part of the theology faculty because they happened to have the first electronic computer). Personally, being of the former type (AI for understanding systems), I'd say it fits more in the science department than computer science ever did, but the latter form (AI as advanced algorithms in CS) would certainly fit better in the engineering faculty together with the bulk of computer 'science'.