Which one of the following is an application of Artificial Intelligence?

Correct — C, Natural language processing. Artificial intelligence covers techniques that let a machine carry out tasks normally requiring human intelligence, and natural language processing is one of its established application areas — the machine has to parse grammar, resolve ambiguity and infer intent from ordinary human language, none of which reduces to a fixed rule table. Machine translation, speech recognition, spam filtering, sentiment analysis and conversational assistants are all built on it. The other three options are ordinary components of computing that follow deterministic instructions and involve no learning or inference.

• (a)Database management system — Software for storing, organising and retrieving structured data through queries. It executes exactly what the query specifies and does not infer, learn or generalise.
• (b)Operating system — The program that manages hardware and other software — processes, memory, files, input and output. It is essential infrastructure, but scheduling and memory allocation are algorithmic housekeeping, not artificial intelligence.
• (d)Register — A register is a small, very fast storage location inside the processor itself. It is a hardware component, not an application of any kind.

Artificial intelligence is the branch of computer science concerned with building systems that perceive, reason, learn or act in ways that would need intelligence in a person. Its recognised application areas include natural language processing, computer vision, speech recognition, robotics, expert systems and recommendation engines. Machine learning is the dominant technique within it, in which a model is fitted to data rather than programmed with explicit rules, and deep learning is the subset of machine learning using multi-layer neural networks.

The distractors here are drawn from three different levels of a computer system — a hardware register, the system software that runs the machine, and an application for handling stored data — and none involves inference. The test to apply is whether the task has a single specified correct procedure. Retrieving a record matching a query does; deciding what a sentence means does not, because human language is ambiguous, context-dependent and full of exceptions, which is exactly why it is an artificial-intelligence problem.

• Natural language processing lets computers interpret and generate human language and is a core area of artificial intelligence.
• Machine translation, speech recognition and conversational assistants are built on natural language processing.
• Machine learning fits models to data instead of following explicitly programmed rules.
• A database management system executes structured queries and performs no inference.
• A register is a small storage unit inside the processor, the fastest memory in the machine.

• Assuming any advanced-sounding software is artificial intelligence; an operating system is not.
• Confusing a hardware component such as a register with a software application.
• Treating a database query as machine reasoning; the query specifies exactly what is to be retrieved.

A definition item that separates artificial-intelligence applications from ordinary computing components, with one hardware term thrown in as a check on carelessness.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is the smallest and fastest storage location, situated inside the processor?

  • (a)Cache memory
  • (b)Register
  • (c)Main memory
  • (d)Hard disk

  Answer(b) Register — registers sit within the processor itself and are faster than cache, main memory or any secondary storage.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Machine learning differs from conventional programming chiefly in that it

  • (a)requires no hardware
  • (b)builds its rules from data rather than being given them explicitly
  • (c)runs only on supercomputers
  • (d)cannot make errors

  Answer(b) builds its rules from data rather than being given them explicitly — the model is fitted to examples instead of coded step by step.