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The original, main goal of AI was to produce systems that exhibit all the intelligence and creativity of human beings and perhaps even produce systems that are superior to human beings. When this proved to be hard, a secondary goal developed, it is to produce relatively small useful systems that do tasks that in people would require intelligence. The systems may or may not exhibit actual intelligence. A system without intelligence might be one that uses a fixed algorithm but which nevertheless does something you would normally think requires intelligence. If you've got a question or comment along those lines post it in the appropriate subgroup or if none of them is appropriate post in comp.ai.