Artificial intelligence (AI) is a scientific field whose goal is to understand intelligent thought processes and behavior and to develop methods for building computer systems that act as if they are "thinking" and can learn from themselves. Although the study of intelligence is the subject of other disciplines such as philosophy, physiology, psychology, and neuroscience, people in those disciplines have begun to work with computational scientists to build intelligent machines. The computers offer a vehicle for testing theories of intelligence, which in turn enable further exploration and understanding of the concept of intelligence.

The growing information needs of the electronic age require sophisticated mechanisms for information processing. As Richard Forsyth and Roy Rada (1986) point out, AI can enhance information processing applications by enabling the computer systems to store and represent knowledge, to apply that knowledge in problem solving through reasoning mechanisms, and finally to acquire new...