perceive and understand, to choose wisely, and to act successfully under large variety of circumstances so as to survive and prosper in a complex and often hostile nvironment. [3] Intelligence can be observed to grow and evolve, both through growth in omputational power and through accumulation of knowledge of how to sense, decide and act in complex and changing world.
The above characterization of an intelligent system is rather general. According to this, a reat number of systems can be considered intelligent. In fact, according to this definition, even a thermostat may be considered to be an intelligent system, although of low level of intelligence. It is common, however, to call a system intelligent when in fact it has a rather high level of intelligence.
There exist a number of alternative but related definitions of intelligent systems and in the following we mention several. They provide alternative, but related characterizations of intelligent systems with emphasis on systems with high degrees of intelligence.
The following definition emphasizes the fact that the system in question processes information, and it focuses on man-made systems and intelligent machines:
A. Machine intelligence is the process of analyzing, organizing and converting data into knowledge; where (machine) knowledge is defined to be the structured information acquired and applied to remove ignorance or uncertainty about a specific task pertaining to the intelligent machine. This definition leads to the principle of increasing precision with decreasing intelligence, which claims that: applying machine intelligence to a database generates a flow of knowledge, lending an analytic form to facilitate modeling of the process. Next, an intelligent system is characterized by its ability to dynamically assign subgoals and control actions in an internal or autonomous fashion:
B. Many adaptive or learning control systems can be thought of as designing a control law to meet well-defined control objectives. This activity represents the system’s attempt to organize or order its “knowledge” of its own dynamical behavior, so to meet a control objective. The organization of knowledge can be seen as one important attribute of intelligence. If this organization is done autonomously by the system, then intelligence becomes a property of the system, rather than of the system’s designer. This implies that systems which autonomously (self) -organize controllers with respect to an internally realized organizational principle are intelligent control systems. [5]
A procedural characterization of intelligent systems is given next:
C. Intelligence is a property of the system that emerges when the procedures of focusing attention, combinatorial search, and generalization are applied to the input information in order to produce the output. One can easily deduce that once a string of the above procedures is defined, the other levels of resolution of the structure of intelligence are growing as a result of the recursion. Having only one level structure leads to a rudimentary intelligence that is implicit in the thermostat, or to a variable-structure sliding mode controller.
The concepts of intelligence and control are closely related and the term “Intelligent Control” has a unique and distinguishable meaning. An intelligent system must define and use goals. Control is then required to move the system to these goals and to define such goals. Consequently, any intelligent system will be a control system. Conversely, intelligence is necessary to provide desirable functioning of systems under changing conditions, and it is necessary to achieve a high degree of autonomous behavior in a control system. Since control is an essential part of any

