Artificial intelligence is a subject that, due to the massive, often quite unintelligible, publicity that it gets, is nearly completely misunderstood by people outside the field. Even AIs practitioners are somewhat confused with respect to what AI is really about.

Is AI mathematics? A great many AI researchers believe strongly that knowledge representations used in AI programs must conform to previously established formalisms and logics or else the field will be unprincipled and ad hoc. Many AI researchers believe that they know how the answer will turn out before they have figured out what exactly the questions are. They know that some mathematical formalism or other must be the best way to express the contents of the knowledge that people have. Thus, to them, AI is an exercise in the search for the proper formalisms to use in representing knowledge.

Is AI software engineering? A great many AI practitioners seem to think so. If you can put knowledge into a program, then that program must be an AI program. This conception of AI, derived as it is from much of the work going on in industry in expert systems, has served to confuse AI people tremendously about what the correct focus of AI ought to be, and about what the fundamental issues in AI are.