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We have 178 questions tagged as . As you can guess, those questions do not seem to differ anyhow to the questions tagged as .

Should we map $\rightarrow$ ? Or maybe, there is some artificial intelligence outside of machine learning, and this should be clarified in the wiki, while the irrelevant question are un-tagged? Or maybe, we should tag those questions also with and ?

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I think that artificial intelligence is related to, but distinct from, machine learning. Machine learning, at least as it is practiced today, comprises automatic methods to learn from large volumes of data against rather structured problems: given data in a very exactly-laid out format (a feature vector, a graph, a tokenized corpus, an image), make an inference about one specific quantity (e.g. probability of class membership).

People can bicker about what, exactly, AI is, but I think it's fair to say that AI aspires to be more general than simply ham/spam e-mail classifiers or recognizing handwritten digits. I think the dream among AI researchers is that AI will be generic as self-teaching systems which can apply knowledge gained in one area to a new area, or to be reasoning machines, or work with non-structured data on open-ended tasks, or be creative, or other lofty goals.

That said, I'd be surprised if the tag is used in that sense on stats.SE; I suspect (and even hope!) that questions about AI in the sense that I describe above are self-sorted to the AI.SE website, as that would appear to be their unique value-add to the SE ecosystem.

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  • $\begingroup$ So your suggestion is to add something like "if it is really about AI, post it at AI.SE" to the wiki? $\endgroup$
    – Tim Mod
    Jan 21, 2019 at 9:12
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    $\begingroup$ @Tim I would rather add "If it is not really about AI, please use another tag" :-) $\endgroup$
    – amoeba
    Jan 21, 2019 at 9:40
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    $\begingroup$ @amoeba say, [blockchain] ? ;) $\endgroup$
    – Tim Mod
    Jan 21, 2019 at 9:47
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    $\begingroup$ @Tim I think the wiki could be a sharper about the contrast between AI and ML. We could also add something to the effect of "AI.SE specifically specializes in questions about AI, so your question may get more specialized attention there." However, I also don't want to give people the impression that misnomer-AI (that is, questions about ML) are off-topic here (and I outline why in previous meta.stats.SE posts). $\endgroup$
    – Sycorax Mod
    Jan 21, 2019 at 14:47

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