In the past decade, artificial intelligence has been making waves. From self-driving cars to Siri to Alexa, artificial intelligence is everywhere. But what exactly is it?

The term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College. His work was based on the idea that computers could be made to exhibit intelligent behavior if they were programmed correctly.

Since then, many people have taken up the mantle of creating intelligent machines-from engineers and computer scientists like Alan Turing and John von Neumann to psychologists like B. F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov. And today, dozens of different types of artificial intelligence algorithms are being used by companies worldwide: deep learning algorithms, machine learning algorithms... even genetic algorithms!