Advanced · Cognitive

Symbolic AI

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. An approach to AI that attempts to represent human knowledge explicitly using symbols and rules.

Technical Definition

An approach to AI that attempts to represent human knowledge explicitly using symbols and rules.

How it works

Symbolic AI, also known as 'Good Old-Fashioned AI' (GOFAI), dominated early AI research. It focuses on representing problems and knowledge using high-level symbols and logical rules, enabling explicit reasoning and inference. While powerful for tasks requiring logical deduction and knowledge manipulation (e.g., expert systems), it faces challenges in handling ambiguity and learning from raw perceptual data, which neural networks excel at.