Computational intelligence

The expression computational intelligence (CI) usually refers to the ability of a computer to learn a specific task from data or experimental observation. Even though it is commonly considered a synonym of soft computing, there is still no commonly accepted definition of computational intelligence. Generally, computational intelligence is a set of nature-inspired computational methodologies and approaches to address complex real-world problems to which mathematical or traditional modelling can be useless for a few reasons: the processes might be too complex for mathematical reasoning, it might contain some uncertainties during the process, or the process might simply be stochastic in nature. Indeed, many real-life problems cannot be translated into binary language (unique values of 0 and 1) for computers to process it. Computational Intelligence therefore provides solutions for such problems. The methods used are close to the human's way of reasoning, i.e. it uses inexact and incomplete knowledge, and it is able to produce control actions in an adaptive way. CI therefore uses a combination of five main complementary techniques. The fuzzy logic which enables the computer to understand natural language, artificial neural networks which permits the system to learn experiential data by operating like the biological one, evolutionary computing, which is based on the process of natural selection, learning theory, and probabilistic methods which helps dealing with uncertainty imprecision. Except those main principles, currently popular approaches include biologically inspired algorithms such as swarm intelligence and artificial immune systems, which can be seen as a part of evolutionary computation, image processing, data mining, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence, which tends to be confused with Computational Intelligence. But although both Computational Intelligence (CI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) seek similar goals, there's a clear distinction between them. Computational Intelligence is thus a way of performing like human beings. Indeed, the characteristic of 'intelligence' is usually attributed to humans. More recently, many products and items also claim to be 'intelligent', an attribute which is directly linked to the reasoning and decision making. The notion of Computational Intelligence was first used by the IEEE Neural Networks Council in 1990. This Council was founded in the 1980s by a group of researchers interested in the development of biological and artificial neural networks. On November 21, 2001, the IEEE Neural Networks Council became the IEEE Neural Networks Society, to become the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society two years later by including new areas of interest such as fuzzy systems and evolutionary computation, which they related to Computational Intelligence in 2011 (Dote and Ovaska). But the first clear definition of Computational Intelligence was introduced by Bezdek in 1994: a system is called computationally intelligent if it deals with low-level data such as numerical data, has a pattern-recognition component and does not use knowledge in the AI sense, and additionally when it begins to exhibit computational adaptively, fault tolerance, speed approaching human-like turnaround and error rates that approximate human performance. Bezdek and Marks (1993) clearly differentiated CI from AI, by arguing that the first one is based on soft computing methods, whereas AI is based on hard computing ones.