Artificial Intelligence is a very, very large and diverse field consisting of numerous AI-related sciences such as (hold your breath !) neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, robotics, linguistics - basically any research gravitated towards the artificial reproduction of the methods or results of human reasoning and brain activity (from The Artificial Intelligence Dictionary).

There is so much interest in AI because of its wide-ranging applications - especially commercial ones. For example, researchers have written neural network software (software that employ internetwork of neurons to analyse data - similar to the human brain) that process stock market information to generate forecasts - highly accurate forecasts. Also, research in speech recognition could one day revolutionize the manner in which we communicate with electronic devices - we can tell them what do do, instead of having to press a multitude of tiny buttons. In fact, IBM's OS/2 Warp 4.0 Operating System has built-in voice recognition capabilities - once voice recognition technology matures, this would be the rule, not the exception. Similarly, handwriting recognition technology allows us to write, instead of type. We no longer have to adapt to computers - computers will adapt to us. The applications are endless - Artificial Intelligence software can diagnose diseases (Expert Systems), coordinate machine systems (Fuzzy logic), aid in space exploration (intelligent robots remotely explore the planet Mars), translate documents between lanaguages (Natural Language Processing, NLP), etc. Just look at the impact of the virtual pet, Tamagotchi, on society today - and we have barely even touched the surface of mainstream applications of AI.