Some AI present examples,

Autonomous planning and scheduling: A hundred miles from Earth, NASA's Remote Agent program became the first on-board autonomous planning program to control the scheduling operations for the spacecraft.

Game Playing: IBM's Deep Blue is the famous example for the AI in Game Playing. It was the first computer program to defeat the world champion in a chess match when it bested Garry Casparov by a score of 3.5 to 2.5 in an exhibition match. By this the value of IBM's stocks increased by USD 18Billion.

Autonomous Control: The ALVINN computer vision system was the first of its kind. This system was trained to steer a car to kkep it following a lane. It was placed in CMU's NavLab computer-controlled minivan and used to navigate across the United States - for 2850 miles it was in contol of steering the vehicle 985 of the time. A human took over the vehicle 2% of time mostly at exit ramps. This system had a set of video cameras that transmits road images to the computer, which then computes the best direction to steer, based on the experience from previous runs.

Definitions for AI by Scholars,

" It is the art of creating machines that perform functions that require intellegience when performed by people."
Kurzweil

" The automation of activites that we associate with human thinking, activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning, and so on...."
Bellman

Personally, the only times I've ever dealt with artificial intelligence was when I was making a Custom Battle system for an RPGMaker2000 Game. That was surely a pain in the neck, considering I had to set up several variables for the X and Y to let it know what to, when to attack when close enough, etc. Long story short, I got frustrated and gave up half-way through. I wish I had a team of people under my control like the corporates at Nintendo do. Then my AI would be somewhat effective.

1. The ability of a computer or other machine to perform those activities that are normally thought to require intelligence.
2. The branch of computer science concerned with the development of machines having this ability.

Ok, first of all artificial intelligence is a part of cognitive science and is still under development. Its aim is to create something what is not human nor live (that way it is artificial), but could demonstrate logical “thinking”. Today, unfortunately, there is no real artificial intelligence. Of course, there are systems, that are able to demonstrate some level of “rational thinking” and is said to be as “smart” as approximately 5-6 years old kid.

In practice artificial intelligence theory is mainly used when creating complex solution support systems, image or object recognition systems and so on.
One thing that has to be pointed out, that cognitive science denies possibility to create artificial intelligence on linear process machines (that is regular PC ) as its operation methods are to different from the ones in human brain. Instead of linear processing units one has to use neural networks that is a way different computing way and functions more like human brain, as one computing element of neural network is something like synthetic representation of brain cell. I suppose there should be another thread on neural networks as different type of computing
For example neural network can find out the formula if you supply it with series or argument ad result. It is similar to standard IQ test task where one has to find the next number in a row according to some pattern – that ways it can be considered as some sort of intelligence.

If someone is really interested in that, give me a shout (ravenblack@bluebottle.com) and I’ll try to dig out my university ones and make a translation on it.

It is interesting discipline …

I have only basic programming knowledge, but isn't AI simply just a whole bunch of IF, AND, OR commands and rules that govern how the computer approaches any task?

AI is being used by psychologists now to investigate how we think and processes that go on in our own brains. make sense.

Yeap, on some level you are right. in expert / solution support AI is more or less just a realy big bunch of IF, AND, OR commands, but in neural networks, these comands are used to "train" network only and it doe not use them afterwards, but applies the paterns/schemes/logics it "has learned".

The problem with neural networks is that they can be "trained" to do one (or several, but not a bunch) task only, duo to physical limitations of network size. This problem egzist now, but in a future it can be solved...

We're using artificial intelligence right now. Our computers.

It's weird. Human's have been taking leaps of faith on Earth for 2000 years, yet we are held back. Think about it. We've reached space, the moon, and are trying to go farther. Some people don't accept the fact that we are going to be working on getting to places like Mars for a very long time.

Then again, I may be wrong. Back to topic:

Humans have learned to make a lot of things, like computers for example. Things like the Internet, which was released not long ago (check date), and we're starting to experience Web 2.0, and www.yourname.web.com domain names. People have made these things from scratch. It's nifty to think about how people coded/made everything we see right now. (assuming your looking at your computer screen)

I have to disagree with you. Our computers are in fact artificial, but not intelligence by far. Intelligence is far much more that linear data processing at high speed.
When I comes to artificial intelligence you have to dig into many disciplines and theories such as psychology, neurology, philosophy, perfectionism, computing, electronics, robotics and so on.