G'day

The concept of AI has been a pretty hot topic in my mind for quite a while. I've read various literature, thought a lot about the many various aspects of AI, even written a little bit down on paper (to try to clear my thoughts), and recently hacked together a bit of code with the hopes of modelling a basic Neural Network. It all seems very exciting to me, except for one problem - I have no idea what I want to do with it.

So far what I've seen is a lot of demonstrations of the XOR algorithm (or rather, XOR rule-set) being learnt, which I guess demonstrates the ability to "learn" how to do something, but I have seen very little application of AI in fields where it is actually useful or impressive. Notable exceptions would be Speech recognition, where some form of AI seems to be present.

So my question is, what would you want to achieve with AI? What would your pet project involving AI be?

Regards,

James