The science that surpasses reality and disproves man's claim to be the brightest being is known as artificial intelligence (AI). AI is the technology for producing a machine so intelligent that it starts to think like a human. Complicated algorithms, audio-, and vision-processing systems, natural language processing and inference engines, machine learning, and expert systems, as they were originally known, enable intelligent computers, as they were once known, to not only think but also sense, comprehend, and act in ways similar to a human (refer to figure). Thus, a more common definition of AI would be "AI is the study of intelligent agents: any technology that observes its surroundings and acts in a way that increases the likelihood that it will succeed in attaining its goals.

A science that is enthralling the globe and is predicted to spark the fifth industrial revolution is artificial intelligence. However, AI is not brand-new, despite what you might have thought. Amazingly, references to artificially intelligent beings may be found in the myths of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Indians, and Chinese. But Turing's 1936 creation of the first machine to employ an algorithm marked the beginning of contemporary artificial intelligence. At the Dartmouth conference in 1956, John McCarthy officially coined the term "artificial intelligence," which was then used to describe the field of study.

In the case of India, though, the first program on AI in India was conducted as early as the 1960s by Professor H.N. Mahabala research in AI actually took off in 1986 when the Government of India launched the Knowledge-Based Computing Systems (KBCS) program in conjunction with the United Nations Development Program. Several projects have been undertaken by Indian scientists since then. Some of the earliest projects on Artificial Intelligence in India are the project on Machine Translation for Indian Languages by IIT Kanpur; Optical Character Recognition project by ISI Kolkata; flight-scheduling expert system, Sarani, developed by CDAC, Mumbai; a speech synthesis system developed for Indian railways by TIFR; an image-processing facility developed by IISc using AI and vision techniques.

The complete history of AI is more intriguing, but let’s move ahead.