THE OPTIMIZE EDIT
THEOPTIMIZEEDIT
WHAT IS AI - MINISERIES V1
Welcome to our miniseries of the Optimize Edit. Where our head of Research and Development, Dr Ross Conroy writes on the technology of optimisation and the role it plays in our Optimize technology Kicking off the series, Ross talks about what is AI?
“So, I would like to open with an attempt at answering the question “What is AI?”. AI or Artificial intelligence is an area of computer science with the goal of enabling computers to solve real-world problems that we would usually expect from human brains. I know this sounds very vague, but AI covers a very wide range of problems from path finding to image recognition.
So why are problems typically solved with AI so difficult to solve? Under the hood computers are really just really fast calculators. This leads to a general rule-of-thumb in computer science that problems humans find difficult to solve computers find easy such as calculating statistics on a table. However, problems humans find easy to solve computers find difficult like identifying objects in a photo. This largely comes down to things we find difficult can be defined with very clear step by step instructions e g to calculate an average add up all the values then divide by how many there are. However, if I showed you a picture of an apple you would know immediately that it is an apple from all your life experience of what apples look like, however a computer will not share your extensive knowledge of apples and would need rules to identify it as an apple.
WHAT IS AI? - MINISERIES V1
So, if computers today are so powerful, why can't we just brute force our way through AI problems? For very small problems this is already possible, however it this quickly becomes impossible. Using route re-sequencing as an example, the number of stops drives how many possible sequence combinations exist as a factorial of the number of stops represented as a ! symbol. A factorial is calculated as a number multiplied by all numbers below it to 1, e.g 4! = 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24 therefore a route with 4 stops would have 24 possible sequence combinations but only one will be the most efficient. A brute-force approach would need to analyse all 24 routes to identify the most efficient. Increasing this slightly to 10 stops becomes 3,628,800 possible combinations. Ok maybe a powerful enough computer could analyse all those routes, lets increase to 15 stops and suddenly there are 1,307,674,368,000 possible combinations and no computer today could analyse all those combinations to find the best one in any reasonable amount of time
So if brute force isn’t possible then how does AI find optimal sequences? Part of the truth is without analysing every possible combination you cannot truly know what is the most optimal sequence, however you can identify likely or close to optimal sequences. The way AI can achieve this is by taking shortcuts in a similar way to how the human brain takes shortcuts. If you have ever had a jump scare at a hat and coat hanging on the wall, then you have experienced a common shortcut our brains take every day. Your brain will have identified the hat and coat as a threat before you have fully assessed your surroundings. Rather than constantly assessing every item in the room constantly which would slow down your reaction time, your brain has taken some shortcuts with pattern recognition to alert you of a “threat”. A large part of the field of AI is finding shortcuts like this to avoid the need to brute-force our way through problems.”
Stay tuned for the next edition of the miniseries which comes out every month In the meantime, if you are interested you can visit our www.optimizenow.Ai where you can find out more about how we use this technology to optimise your fleet.
