Say CBAS,

There are two major divisions of AI. The first is centered on rule based systems and are sometimes called Expert Systems and/or production engines. They are based on long lists of explicit rules like "If the outside temperature is below x degrees, turn up the thermostat y points, UNLESS some other rule etc."

The other major AI religion is based on neural networks and Perl has some modules that are used to build such systems. If you use Active State and PPM look for

• AI-NeuralNet-BackProp
• AI-NeuralNet-Mesh

Back Propagation is a means to tune the neural net based upon known outcomes. The Mesh is used to experiment with neural nets. NNs are particluarly suited to answer questions like "Is this a picture of a dog?, regardless of the orientation of the picture. I'd go to Google and/or amazon.com and search out expert systems and neural nets for the most recent refs. Hurry, we are all anxious to see some system pass the "Turing Test". (Look it up - named for Alan Turning.)

-Diskcrash