Аннотация

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is an exciting field and my purpose in writing this book is to convey some of that excitement to you. I will be using the Raspberry Pi single-board computer as the primary tool through which you can explore how AI works and, consequently, gain additional insight on how you might incorporate AI into your projects and/or applications.
I do want to make something perfectly clear at the outset: reading this book and completing all the projects will not make you an expert in AI. This is analogous to the situation where a layperson taking a first aid course could never claim to be a medical doctor or a nurse after taking that course. Becoming an AI expert requires that you take many college courses—both undergraduate and graduate—in a variety of areas, including mathematics, computer science, logic, and even philosophy. There are also AI experts who come from other spheres of interest, including music and the allied arts. Having made the previous statements, I do want you to understand that gaining a reasonable introduction to AI is very achievable by reading this book and other readily available resources. It is just that you should not try to claim that you are an AI expert after reading this book.
I will next discuss why the Raspberry Pi is a good platform with which to examine AI.
You should first note that it is a very capable computer on its own merit. Why certainly not as fast nor as memory capable as a modern PC or Mac, it is no slouch, especially when using a Raspberry Pi 3. This model has a clock speed of 1 GHz, uses four cores, and has 1 GB of dynamic ram. This is quite impressive when you realize that this performance comes with a price tag of only $35 (USD). However, the key feature that makes the Raspberry Pi so attractive for AI demonstrations is that it is a microcontroller. This means you can directly control things based upon the outcome of AI events. Microcontrollers also allow sensors to be easily connected to them, thus allowing AI applications a means to interact with the real world.
While PCs can also be set up to both sense and control, it often requires expensive and complex interfaces to achieve these capabilities. The Raspberry Pi was initially designed to be able to sense and control devices with minimal interface requirements, and perhaps more importantly, minimal software requirements. PC software interfaces are often very complex, expensive, and typically proprietary—meaning making user changes or modifications is a difficult-to-impossible task.
The Raspberry Pis that I use in this book use a Raspian Linux distribution named Jessie. This distribution is completely open source and freely available from the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s download website. It is a very stable operating system (OS) and supports several extremely large open-source applications repositories. This means that all the software used in this book is freely available and easily downloadable into the Raspberry Pi.