Introduction

Abstract

Ever since the advent of computers, people have been intrigued by the possibility of making computers exhibit behavior similar to the general intelligent capabilities of humans. Since the early fifties of this century, this goal is being addressed in the subdiscipline of computer science that has come to be known under the name of Artificial Intelligence (AI) [Charniak and McDermott, 1985; Winston, 1992]. We can define the goal of this discipline in a general fashion as the construction of computer models of behavior that is regarded as intelligent in humans. Over the course of AI’s history, the kinds of behavior that have been studied have varied, and there is no universally accepted position on what form the computer model is to take, and whether it is to be regarded as an embodiment of intelligence or, as the author believes, merely an operational description of intelligence (see [Morik, 1992, ch. 1]).