Editing The Age of Spiritual Machines (section)

===Artificial intelligence===

[[File:Neural network.svg|thumb|left|300px|A simple artificial neural network|alt=Picture of a few circles connected by lines]]

Kurzweil says [[Alan Turing]]'s 1950 paper ''[[Computing Machinery and Intelligence]]'' launched the field of artificial intelligence. He admits that early progress in the field led to wild predictions of future successes which did not materialize. Kurzweil feels intelligence is the "ability to use optimally limited resources" to achieve goals.{{sfn|Kurzweil|1999|pp=68-73}} He contrasts [[recursion|recursive]] solutions with [[neural network|neural nets]], he likes both but specifically mentions how valuable neural nets are since they destroy information during processing, which if done selectively is essential to making sense of real-world data. A neuron either fires or not "reducing the babble of its inputs to a single bit".{{sfn|Kurzweil|1999|pp=76-78}} He also greatly admires [[genetic algorithm]]s which mimic biological evolution to great effect.

Recursion, neural nets and genetic algorithms are all components of intelligent machines, Kurzweil explains. Beyond algorithms Kurzweil says the machines will also need knowledge. The emergent techniques, neural nets and genetic algorithms, require significant training effort above and beyond creating the initial machinery.{{sfn|Kurzweil|1999|pp=81-84}} While hand-coded knowledge is tedious and brittle acquiring knowledge through language is extremely complex.{{sfn|Kurzweil|1999|pp=91-95}}