Towards a pragmatic philosophy of artificial intelligence

Recent media interest in artificial intelligence (AI) (mainly through commercial exploitation of expert systems) and programming languages used within the field can only be sustained and built upon if those interested possess an overall awareness of the background against which most AI research is undertaken. AI has a small, although growing, fundamental base of core theory; it attacks difficult problems by expedient means and pioneering effort and aims to generate sufficient or adequate solutions which can themselves be refined and then perhaps incorporated into the fundamentals of AI theory.