Artificial Intelligence (AI) tries to enable computers to do the things that minds can do. These things include seeing pathways, picking things up, learning categories from experience, and using emotions to schedule one's actions—which many animals can do, too. Thus, human intelligence is not the sole focus of AI. Even terrestrial psychology is not the sole focus, because some people use AI to explore the range of all possible minds.

There are four major AI methodologies: symbolic AI, connectionism, situated robotics, and evolutionary programming (Russell and Norvig 2003). AI artifacts are correspondingly varied. They include both programs (including neural networks) and robots, each of which may be either designed in detail or largely evolved. The field is closely related to artificial life (A-Life), which aims to throw light on biology much as some AI aims to throw light on psychology.

AI researchers are inspired by two...