AI vs. machine learning vs. deep learning: Key differences

The term AI has been around since the 1950s. In short, it depicts our struggle to build machines that can challenge what made humans the dominant lifeform on the planet: our intelligence. However, defining "intelligence" has turned out to be rather tricky, because what we perceive as intelligent changes over time. Early AIs were rule-based computer programs that could solve somewhat complex problems. Instead of hardcoding every decision the software was supposed to make, the program was divided into a knowledge base and an inference engine. Developers would fill out the knowledge base with facts, and the inference engine would then query those facts to arrive at results.