ARTIFICIAL

INTELLIGENCE
Chapter 1: Introduction

Instructor: Dr Ghulam Mustafa

Department of Information Technology
PUGC
In which we try to explain why we consider
artificial intelligence to be a subject most
worthy of study, and in which we try to
decide what exactly it is, this being a good
thing to decide before embarking.
 Outline
• What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
• The foundations of AI
• The history of AI
• The state of the art
Artificial Intelligence
 Artificial Intelligence
• Homo sapiens – man the wise
• How we think i.e.
– Perceive, understand, predict & manipulate
• AI is not just to understand but build
intelligent entities
• Field I would most like to be in
 What is AI?
Views of AI fall into four categories:

Thinking humanly Thinking rationally

Acting humanly Acting rationally

The textbook advocates "acting rationally"

 Acting humanly: Turing Test
• The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing (1950)
• "Can machines think?"  "Can machines behave intelligently?"
• Operational test for intelligent behavior: the Imitation Game

• Predicted that by 2000, a machine might have a 30% chance of

fooling a lay person for 5 minutes
• Suggested major components of AI: knowledge, reasoning,
language understanding, learning
• Total Turing test with video signal: computer vision, robotics
 Thinking humanly: cognitive
modeling
• Requires scientific theories of internal activities
of the brain
• How to validate?
– introspection—trying to catch our own
thoughts as they go by
– psychological experiments—observing a
person in action
– brain imaging—observing the brain in action
• The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science brings
together computer models from AI and experimental
techniques from psychology to construct precise and
testable theories of the human mind.
 Thinking rationally: "laws of
thought"
• Aristotle was one of the first to attempt to codify “right
thinking,”
• Provided patterns for argument structures that always
yielded correct conclusions when given correct premises
• for example,
– “Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore, Socrates is
mortal.”
• Problems:
– not easy to convert informal knowledge into formal (logical
notation), when the knowledge is less than 100% certain.
– Second, there is a big difference between solving a problem “in
principle” and solving it in practice(exhaust the computational
resources)
 Acting rationally: rational agent
• Rational behavior: doing the right thing
• A rational agent is one that acts so as to
achieve the best outcome or, when there is
uncertainty, the best expected outcome.
• Doesn't necessarily involve thinking – e.g.,
blinking reflex – but thinking should be in the
service of rational action
• Advantages
– more general
– amenable to scientific development
 Rational agents
• An agent is an entity that perceives and acts
– operate autonomously, perceive their environment,
persist over a prolonged time period, adapt to
change, and create and pursue goals.
• Abstractly, an agent is a function from percept
histories to actions:
[f: P*  A]
• For any given class of environments and tasks,
we seek the agent (or class of agents) with the
best performance
• Caveat: computational limitations make perfect
rationality unachievable
 design best program for given machine resources
 The foundations of AI
Philosophy
– Can formal rules be used to draw valid conclusions?
– How does the mind arise from a physical brain?
– Where does knowledge come from?
– How does knowledge lead to action?
• Syllogisms
– an instance of a form of reasoning in which a conclusion is drawn from two given
or assumed propositions (premises); deductive reasoning
• Rationalism
– power of reasoning in understanding the world
• Dualism
– a part of the human mind (or soul or spirit) that is outside of nature, exempt of
physical laws
• Materialism
– brain’s operation according to the laws of physics constitutes the mind
• Empiricism
– principle of induction: that general rules are acquired by exposure to repeated
associations between their elements.
• Aristotle Algorithm
– actions are justified by a logical connection between goals and knowledge of the
action’s outcome e.g. General Problem Solver now Regression Planning System.
 The foundations of AI
 Mathematics
– What are the formal rules to draw valid conclusions?
– What can be computed?
– How do we reason with uncertain information?
• Logic
– Propositional Logic, First Order Logic
– Algorithm
• Logical deduction
– Incompleteness theorem
• some functions on the integers cannot be represented by an algorithm—that is, they cannot be
computed.

• Computation
– Tractability
• a problem is called intractable if the time required to solve instances of the problem grows
exponentially with the size of the instances
– NP-completeness
• Intractable problem are NP-Complete

• Probability
– Bayesian Rule
• updating probabilities in the light of new evidence
NP Complete
 The foundations of AI
 Economics
– How should we make decisions so as to maximize payoff?
– How should we do this when others may not go along?
– How should we do this when the payoff may be far in the future?
• Utility
– how people make choices that lead to preferred outcomes or utility
• Decision theory
– probability theory + utility theory
– framework for decisions (economic or otherwise) made under uncertainty
• Game theory
– the actions of one player can significantly affect the utility of another (either
positively or negatively).
• Operations research
– Markov decision processes
• Satisficing
• making decisions that are “good enough”
 The foundations of AI
 Neuroscience
– How do brains process information?
 The foundations of AI
 Psychology
– How do humans and animals think and act?

• Behaviorism
– Study only percepts and actions, not mental processes
• Cognitive psychology
– views the brain as an information-processing device
• Cognitive science
– how computer models could be used to address the psychology of
memory, language, and logical thinking
 The foundations of AI
 Computer engineering
– How can we build an efficient computer?

• For artificial intelligence to succeed, we need two things: intelligence

and an artifact.

• Programmable machine
• Computer Languages
• Time sharing machines
• Single Core to Multi Core
 The foundations of AI
 Control theory and cybernetics
– How can artifacts operate under their own control?
• Control theory
• self-regulating feedback control systems include the steam
engine governor, and the thermostat
• regulatory mechanism trying to minimize “error”—the difference
between current state and goal state.
• Cybernetics
• possibility of artificially intelligent machines
• Homeostatic
• devices containing appropriate feedback loops to achieve stable
adaptive behavior.
• Objective function
• The goal is to design of systems that maximize an objective
function over time. This roughly matches our view of AI:
designing systems that behave optimally.
 The foundations of AI
 Linguistics
– How does language relate to thought?

• Computational linguistics or natural language processing.

• Understanding language requires an understanding of the subject
matter and context, not just an understanding of the structure of
sentences.
 Abridged history of AI
• 1943 McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain
• 1950 Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
• 1956 Dartmouth meeting: "Artificial Intelligence" adopted
• 1952—69 Look, Ma, no hands!
• 1950s Early AI programs, including Samuel's checkers
program, Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist,
Gelernter's Geometry Engine
• 1965 Robinson's complete algorithm for logical reasoning
• 1966—73 AI discovers computational complexity
Neural network research almost disappears
• 1969—79 Early development of knowledge-based systems
• 1980-- AI becomes an industry
• 1986-- Neural networks return to popularity
• 1987-- AI becomes a science
• 1995-- The emergence of intelligent agents
• 2001-- The availability of very large data sets
 State of the art
• Robotic vehicles
STANLEY (2005), DARPA, CMU’s BOSS (2006) in urban settings,
Google Self-Drive, Tesla Autopilot, Uber
• Speech recognition
Book a flight through automated speech recognition and dialog
management system.
• Autonomous planning and scheduling
NASA’s Remote Agent program, MAPGEN (NASA’s Mars
Exploration Rovers ), MEXAR2 (European Space Agency’s Mars
Express mission )
• Game playing
IBM’s DEEP BLUE became the first computer program to defeat the
world champion in a chess match when it bested Garry Kasparov
 State of the art
• Spam fighting (undesired electronic messages)
Over a billion email messages are classified as spam
• Logistics planning
In Gulf crisis of 1991, U.S. forces deployed a Dynamic Analysis and
Replanning Tool, DART to do automated logistics planning and
scheduling for transportation. This involved up to 50,000 vehicles,
cargo, and people at a time, and had to account for starting points,
destinations, routes, and conflict resolution among all parameters.
The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) stated
that this single application more than paid back DARPA’s 30-year
investment in AI.
 State of the art
• Robotics
IRobot sold over two million Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners for
home use.
• Machine Translation
A computer program automatically translates from one language to
another language
• The program uses a statistical model built from examples of one
language to another language translations (e.g. Arabic to English)