Computational Intelligence is particularly effective in dealing with complex problems where traditional approaches may struggle, making it widely applicable in fields such as robotics, computer vision, data mining, and artificial intelligence. As these methods often work by learning from data, they are well-suited for handling real-world scenarios where information may be uncertain or incomplete.
The expression computational intelligence (CI) usually refers to the ability of a computer to learn a specific task from data or experimental observation. Even though it is commonly considered a synonym of soft computing, there is still no commonly accepted definition of computational intelligence.
Generally, computational intelligence is a set of nature-inspired computational methodologies and approaches to address complex real-world problems to which mathematical or traditional modelling can be useless for a few reasons: the processes might be too complex for mathematical reasoning, it might contain some uncertainties during the process, or the process might simply be stochastic in nature. Indeed, many real-life problems cannot be translated into binary language (unique values of 0 and 1) for computers to process it. Computational Intelligence therefore provides solutions for such problems.
The methods used are close to the human's way of reasoning, i.e. it uses inexact and incomplete knowledge, and it is able to produce control actions in an adaptive way. CI therefore uses a combination of five main complementary techniques. The fuzzy logic which enables the computer to understand natural language, artificial neural networks which permits the system to learn experiential data by operating like the biological one, evolutionary computing, which is based on the process of natural selection, learning theory, and probabilistic methods which helps dealing with uncertainty imprecision.
Except those main principles, currently popular approaches include biologically inspired algorithms such as swarm intelligence and artificial immune systems, which can be seen as a part of evolutionary computation, image processing, data mining, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence, which tends to be confused with Computational Intelligence. But although both Computational Intelligence (CI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) seek similar goals, there's a clear distinction between them.
Computational Intelligence is thus a way of performing like human beings. Indeed, the characteristic of "intelligence" is usually attributed to humans. More recently, many products and items also claim to be "intelligent", an attribute which is directly linked to the reasoning and decision making.