ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Symbolic AI

Okay kiddo, have you ever played with Legos before? You know how you can build lots of different things by putting the pieces together in different ways? Well, imagine if we could do the same thing with words and information, to help us understand the world better!

That's what Symbolic AI is all about. It's a way of teaching computers to think like us humans, by using symbols (like words and numbers) to represent things in the world. So for example, we might use the symbol "dog" to stand for all the different kinds of dogs that exist, and then use other symbols to describe things about them, like their fur color, weight, or favorite toys.

By doing this, we can create programs that can reason about information, make decisions, and solve problems, just like we do. Symbolic AI has been used for all kinds of things, like playing chess, recognizing speech, and diagnosing medical conditions.

So that's Symbolic AI in a nutshell – it's a way of using symbols to help computers think like humans, and understand the world around us better!