>>4
You are thinking of AGI, which means
artificial general intelligence. There will never be a quick way of creating an AGI because the smarter it is, the more concepts it has to handle. Why? Because that's how you define intelligence. Or am I wrong?
AI is just a
professional way of saying
program to do a certain task or set of tasks. When people talk about
teaching an AI, it means they are using a
natural way to
evolve a program so it reaches a particular
fitness for a given task. If the
fitness function is designed so that the program
evolves (converges) as quickly as possible
and the
fitness value said function agrees with your definition of fitness for the problem, it is a good AI.
Neural networks or
support vector machines are just different structures for the I/O system (feedforward or feedback) and the evolution process to take place. You could as well use something like a
cellular automaton, but personally I have found that simply using whatever
CPU instructions you have available is the best, fastest and overall nicest way.
What matters is the
fitness function. You design the fitness function for the algorithm above, be it neural networks or whatever you want. But the "intelligence" of the program comes
only from a good fitness function. You also need some sort of recombination/evolution algorithm, but that is a trivial thing to implement and often you find good ones accidentally, since evolution tends to just "spring up" from nowhere.