Artificial intelligence gets real

On a recent visit to the doctor, Edward Feigenbaum had the eerie experience of seeing one of his inventions used in a way he never expected: His 25-year-old concept was being used to diagnose a problem with his own breathing. "It's using artificial intelligence," the doctor patiently explained about the spirometer, which measures airflow. A professor of computer science and co-scientific director of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University, Feigenbaum is a pioneer of artificial intelligence (AI) -- the science of making machines think like humans. Dozens of applications have their roots in the Stanford lab he started in 1965 and in related software programs that solve complex problems the same way human experts do. Feigenbaum was the first person to realize that human intelligence springs not from rules of logic but from knowledge about particular problems (whether it's chemistry or auto mechanics) and about the world in general.