Computer Science, what exactly is it?

[Durandal]

As a whole, computer science is a conglomeration of lots of things. Artificial intelligence, as a sub-field, borrows from practically every other field of study in existence. (I dare say that the AI folks do a better job of scientifically modeling intelligence than most psychologists do.)

I think in my AI courses we spent about half the time discussing the structure of one brain or another. Often going back to smaller models like a snail or insect's brain.

We didn't focus on that at all in my course. We covered the basics of how the brain works (the very basics), but my professor was a "weak AI" person. She didn't think an AI that accurately simulated human behavior was very practical. Instead, we focused on specific applications of computer intelligence to various problems, like planning and natural language processing.

[Ariphaos]

We didn't focus on that at all in my course. We covered the basics of how the brain works (the very basics), but my professor was a "weak AI" person. She didn't think an AI that accurately simulated human behavior was very practical. Instead, we focused on specific applications of computer intelligence to various problems, like planning and natural language processing.

Well our goal wasn't to model the human brain, either (that being, most of us agreed, 20-30 years away), but rather to note some of the aspects and interesting quirks behind it. For example, have you ever tried to read something with solely night vision?