The document defines artificial intelligence as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, as coined by John McCarthy in 1955. It discusses the major branches and history of AI, including early milestones like the Turing Test in 1950, the birth of AI research in 1956, and the creation of the Lisp programming language. The document also outlines great achievements in AI such as Deep Blue beating the world chess champion in 1997 and DARPA's grand challenges, and provides examples of current AI applications like driverless vehicles and automatic essay scoring.