Environment means anything that surround us. It can be living things (biotic) or non-living (abiotic) things. It includes physical, chemical and other natural forces. Living things live in their environment.

AI research follows two distinct, and to some extent competing, methods, the symbolic (or “top-down”) approach, and the connectionist (or “bottom-up”) approach. The top-down approach seeks to replicate intelligence by analyzing cognition independent of the biological structure of the brain, in terms of the processing of symbols—whence the symbolic label. The bottom-up approach, on the other hand, involves creating artificial neural networks in imitation of the brain’s structure—whence the connectionist label.