Lecture Notes 18CS753-MODULE5
Lecture Notes 18CS753-MODULE5
Lecture Notes 18CS753-MODULE5
TEXT BOOK:
1. E. Rich, K. Knight & S. B. Nair - Artificial Intelligence, 3/e, McGraw Hill. (CHAPTERS 4, 5,6)
Problem solving o if we solve a problem one may learn from this experience. The next time we see
a similar problem we can solve it more efficiently. This does not usually involve gathering new
knowledge but may involve reorganization of data or remembering how to achieve to solution.
Induction o one can learn from examples. Humans often classify things in the world without
knowing explicit rules. Usually involves a teacher or trainer to aid the classification.
Discovery o Here one learns knowledge without the aid of a teacher.
Analogy
If a system can recognize similarities in information already stored then it may be able to transfer
some knowledge to improve to solution of the task in hand
ROTE LEARNING
Rote Learning is basically memorization.
• Saving knowledge so it can be used again.
• Retrieval is the only problem.
• No repeated computation, inference or query is necessary.
retain it. Clearly the frequency of reuse is a good measure. We could tag an object with its time of
last use.
• If the cache memory is full and we wish to add a new item we remove the least recently used
object. Variations could include some form of cost-benefit analysis to decide if the object should be
removed.
Capabilities of Rote learning include:
– Organized storage information: In order for it to be faster to use a stored value than it would be
to re-compute it, there must be a way to access the appropriate stored value quickly.
– Generalization: The number of distinct objects that might potentially be stored can be very large.
To keep the number of stored objects down to a manageable level, some kind of generalization is necessary.
Learning by Taking Advice:
The idea of advice taking in AI based learning was proposed as early as 1958 (McCarthy). However
very few attempts were made in creating such systems until the late 1970s.
Expert systems providing a major impetus in this area.
There are two basic approaches to advice taking:
• Take high level, abstract advice and convert it into rules that can guide performance elements of the
system. Automate all aspects of advice taking
• Develop sophisticated tools such as knowledge base editors and debugging. These are used to aid an
expert to translate his expertise into detailed rules. Here the expert is an integral part of the
learning system. Such tools are important in expert systems area of AI.
Automated Advice Taking
The following steps summarize this method:
Request
o This can be simple question asking about general advice or more complicated by identifying
shortcomings in the knowledge base and asking for a remedy.
Interpret
o Translate the advice into an internal representation.
Operationalize
o Translated advice may still not be usable so this stage seeks to provide a representation that
can be used by the performance element.
Integrate
o When knowledge is added to the knowledge base care must be taken so that bad side-effects
are avoided.
o E.g. Introduction of redundancy and contradictions.
Evaluate
o The system must assess the new knowledge for errors, contradictions etc.
The steps can be iterated.
Knowledge Base Maintenance
o Instead of automating the five steps above, many researchers have instead assembled tools
that aid the development and maintenance of the knowledge base.
Many have concentrated on:
• Providing intelligent editors and flexible representation languages for integrating new knowledge.
• Providing debugging tools for evaluating, finding contradictions and redundancy in the existing
knowledge base.
Consider a blocks world example in which ON(C,B) and ON(A,TABLE) are true. STRIPS can achieve
ON(A,B) in four steps:
UNSTACK(C,B), PUTDOWN(C), PICKUP(A), STACK(A,B)
STRIPS now builds a macro-operator MACROP with preconditions ON(C,B), ON(A,TABLE), post-conditions
ON(A,B), ON(C,TABLE) and the four steps as its body.
MACROP can now be used in future operation. But it is not very general. The above can be easily
generalized with variables used in place of the blocks. However generalization is not always that easy
LEARNING BY CHUNKING
Chunking involves similar ideas to Macro Operators and originates from psychological ideas on
memory and problem solving.
The computational basis is in production systems (studied earlier). SOAR is a system that use
production rules to represent its knowledge. It also employs chunking to learn from experience.
Basic Outline of SOAR's Method
• SOAR solves problems it fires productions these are stored in long term memory.
• Some firings turn out to be more useful than others.
• When SOAR detects are useful sequence of firings, it creates chunks.
• A chunk is essentially a large production that does the work of an entire sequence of smaller ones.
• Chunks may be generalized before storing.
SOAR is a uniform processing architecture. Problems like choosing which sub goal to tackle and
which operators to try are solved with the same mechanism as the problems in the original problem space.
In solving 8 puzzle problems, SOAR learns how to place a given tile without permanently disturbing
the previously placed tiles. Chunks are generally applicable toward any goal state. This contrasts with
macro tables, which are structured toward reaching a particular goal state from any initial state.
The price that SOAR pays for this generality and flexibility is speed. At present, chunking is
inadequate for duplicating the contents of large, directly-computed macro-operator tables.
by a weighted sum of values of these features. Each class is then defined by a scoring function of the form:
C1t1+C2t2+C3t3+…..
Each t corresponds to a value of a relevant parameter, and c represents the weight to be attached to
the corresponding t.
Ex: if the task is weather prediction, the parameters can be rainfall and location of cold front.
Different functions can be written to combine these parameters to predict sunny, cloudy, rainy or snowy
weather. – Isolate a set of features that are relevant to the task domain. Define each class as a structure
composed of those features.
Ex: if the task is to identify animals, the body of each type of animal can be stored as a structure, with
various features representing such as color, length of neck etc. It is often difficult to construct, by hand, good
class definitions, idea of producing a classification program that can evolve its own class definition –
concept learning or induction.
If classes are described by scoring functions, concept learning can be done using a technique of
coefficient adjustments.
If we want to define class structurally, some other technique for learning class definitions is
necessary.
Three such techniques are: Winston’s Learning Program, Version Spaces, Decision Trees.
WINSTON’S LEARNING PROGRAM
The program started with a line drawing of a blocks world structure. • Construct a semantic net representation of the
structural description of the object(s). • This structure was then provided as input to the learning program.
• The goal is to construct representation of the definitions of concepts in this domain.
• Concepts such a house - brick (rectangular block) with a wedge (triangular block) suitably placed on top of
it, tent - 2 wedges touching side by side, or an arch - two non-touching bricks supporting a third wedge or
brick, were learned.
• The idea of near miss objects -- similar to actual instances was introduced. Input was a line drawing of a
blocks world structure
• Input processed (see VISION Sections later) to produce a semantic net representation of the structural
description of the object
• Links in network include left-of, right-of,
does-not-marry, supported-by, has-part, and
isa.
The marry relation is important -- two objects with a
common touching edge are said to marry. Marrying is
assumed unless does-not-marry stated
2. Examine definitions of other known instance of the concept. Generalize the definition to include them.
3. Examine descriptions of near misses. Restrict the definition to exclude these.
Both steps 2 and 3 rely on comparison and both similarities and differences need to be identified
Node A represents the entire structure, which is composed of two parts: – node B, a wedge – node C,
a brick. The two supporting objects are related not only by left-of and right-of links, but also by a does – not
-marry link, which says that the two objects do not marry.
The two objects marry if they have faces that touch and they have a common edge.
The basic approach that Winston’s program took to the problem of concept formation can be
described as follows:
1. Begin with a structural description of one known instance of the concept. Call that description the
concept definition.
2. Examine descriptions of other known instances of the concept. Generalize the definition to include
them.
3. Examine descriptions of near misses of the concept. Restrict the definition to exclude them.
Step 2 and 3 rely on a comparison process by which similarities and differences between structures
can be detected.
The output of the comparison procedure is a skeleton structure describing the commonalities
between the two input structures.
To see how this approach works, we trace it through the process of learning what an arch is. Suppose
that the arch description of fig (b) is presented first. It then becomes the definition of the concept Arch.
Then suppose the arch description of (c) is presented. The comparison routine will return a structure
similar to the two input structures except that it will note that the objects represented by the nodes labeled
C are not identical.
The c-note link from node C describes the difference found by the comparison routine. It notes that
the difference occurred in the isa link. It also notes that if we were to follow isa links from Brick and
Wedges, these links would eventually merge. At this point, a new description of the concept Arch can be
generated. This description simply says that node C must be either a brick or a wedge.
VERSION SPACES
Goal: to produce a description that is consistent with all positive examples but no negative examples
in the training set. Version spaces works by maintaining a set of possible descriptions and evolving that set
as new examples and near misses are presented.
we assume that a simple frame-based language is used for version space. Structural concept learning
systems are not without their problems. The biggest problem is that the teacher must guide the system
through carefully chosen sequences of examples.
In Winston's program the order of the process is important since new links are added as and when
now knowledge is gathered. The concept of version spaces aims is insensitive to order of the example
presented.
To do this instead of evolving a single concept description a set of possible descriptions are
maintained. As new examples are presented the set evolves as a process of new instances and near misses.
We will assume that each slot in a version space description is made up of a set of predicates that do
not negate other predicates in the set -- positive literals. Indeed we can represent a description as a frame
bases representation with several slots or indeed use a more general representation. For the sake of
simplifying the discussion we will keep to simple representations.
Before we proceed to the version space algorithm, we should make some observations about the
representation. Some descriptions are more general than others. A portion of that partial ordering is shown
in fig 17.10. The entire partial ordering is called the concept space and is depicted
The version space is a set of descriptions, so an initial idea is to keep an explicit list of those
descriptions – Unfortunately, the number of descriptions in the concept space is exponential in the number
of features and values. However, it turns out that the version space has a concise representation. It consists
of two subsets of the concept space.
One subset called G contains the most general descriptions consistent with the training examples
seen so far. The other subset S, contains the most specific descriptions consistent with the training
examples. Version space is a set of all descriptions that lie between some element of G and some element of
S in the partial order of concept space.
This representation of version space is not only efficient for storage, but also for modifications. Each
time we receive a positive training example, we want to make S more general. Negative training examples
serve to make the G set more specific. If S and G sets converge, our range of hypothesis will narrow to a
single concept description. The algorithm for narrowing the version space is called the candidate
elimination algorithm.
• S and G are both singletons, so the algorithm has converged on the target concept. No more examples are
needed.
• Candidate Elimination algorithm is a least-commitment algorithm. The version space is pruned as little as
possible at each step.
• Even if all positive training examples are Japanese cars, the algorithm will not reject the possibility that
the target concept may include cars of other origin – until it receives a negative example that forces
rejection.
• This means that if training data are sparse, S and G may never converge to a single description.
• Algorithm involves exhaustive, breadth-first search through the version space.
• The S set always contains exactly one element, because any two positive examples always have exactly
one generalization.
• The version space has several deficiencies:
– Large space requirements of the exhaustive, breadth-first search.
– Inconsistent data
– noise, can cause the candidate elimination algorithm to prune the target concept from the version
space prematurely.
In the previous example, if the third training instance had been mislabeled (-) instead of (+), the target
concept of “Japanese economy car” would never be reached.
Given enough erroneous negative examples, the G set can be specialized so far that the version space
becomes empty. In this case, the algorithm concludes that no concept fits the training examples.
One solution to this problem is to maintain several G and S sets.
When inconsistency arises, the algorithm switches to G and S sets that are consistent with most, but not
all, of the training examples.
Another problem with the candidate elimination algorithm is the learning of disjunctive concepts
When the concept space is very large, decision tree learning algorithms run more quickly than the
version space. Also disjunction is straightforward.
Drawback of ID3 approach: – Large, complex decision trees can be difficult for humans to
understand, so a decision tree system must have a hard time explaining the reason for its classification.
The position is called a “fork” because the white knight attacks both the black king and the black
queen. • Black must move the king thereby leaving the queen open to capture. From this single experience,
black is able to learn quite a bit about the fork trap. The idea is that if any piece x attacks both the opponents
king and another piece y, then piece y will be lost. We don’t need to see dozens of positive and negative
examples of fork positions in order to draw this conclusion. From just one experience, we can learn to avoid
this trap in the future. An EBL system attempts to learn from a single example x by explaining why x is an
example of the target concept. The explanation is then generalized, and the system’s performance is
improved through the availability of this knowledge.
Knowledge Base
• It contains domain-specific and high-quality knowledge.
• Knowledge is required to exhibit intelligence.
• The success of any ES majorly depends upon the collection of highly accurate and precise
knowledge.
What is Knowledge?
o The data is collection of facts.
o The information is organized as data and facts about the task domain.
o Data, information, and past experience combined together are termed as knowledge.
Components of Knowledge Base
The knowledge base of an ES is a store of both, factual and heuristic knowledge.
Factual Knowledge − It is the information widely accepted by the Knowledge
Engineers and scholars in the task domain.
Heuristic Knowledge − It is about practice, accurate judgment, one’s ability of
evaluation, and guessing.
Knowledge representation
It is the method used to organize and formalize the knowledge in the knowledge base.
It is in the form of IF-THEN-ELSE rules.
Inference Engine
Use of efficient procedures and rules by the Inference Engine is essential in deducting a correct,
flawless solution.
In case of knowledge-based ES, the Inference Engine acquires and manipulates the knowledge
from the knowledge base to arrive at a particular solution.
In case of rule based ES, it
Applies rules repeatedly to the facts, which are obtained from earlier rule application.
o Adds new knowledge into the knowledge base if required.
o Resolves rules conflict when multiple rules are applicable to a particular case.
To recommend a solution, the Inference Engine uses the following strategies
o Forward Chaining
o Backward Chaining
User Interface
User interface provides interaction between user of the ES and the ES itself.
It is generally Natural Language Processing so as to be used by the user who is well- versed in the
task domain.
The user of the ES need not be necessarily an expert in Artificial Intelligence.
It explains how the ES has arrived at a particular recommendation.
The explanation may appear in the following forms
o Natural language displayed on screen.
o Verbal narrations in natural language.
o Listing of rule numbers displayed on the screen.
o The user interface makes it easy to trace the credibility of the deductions.
Requirements of Efficient ES User Interface
Application Description
Design Domain Camera lens design, automobile design.
Medical Domain Diagnosis Systems to deduce cause of disease from
Observed data, conduction medical operations on humans.
Monitoring Systems Comparing data continuously with observed system or with prescribed
behavior such as leakage monitoring in long petroleum pipeline.
Process Control Systems Controlling a physical process based on monitoring.
Knowledge Domain Finding out faults in vehicles, computers.
Finance/Commerce Detection of possible fraud, suspicious transactions, stock market trading,
Airline scheduling, cargo scheduling.
Expert System Technology
There are several levels of ES technologies available.
Expert systems technologies include
Expert System Development Environment
o The ES development environment includes hardware and tools.
o They are
• Workstations,
• minicomputers,
• Mainframes.
• High level Symbolic Programming Languages such as LISt Programming (LISP) and
PROgrammationen LOGique (PROLOG).
• Large databases.
• Tools
• They reduce the effort and cost involved in developing an expert system to large
extent.
• Powerful editors and debugging tools with multi-windows
They provide rapid prototyping
o Have Inbuilt definitions of model,
o knowledge representation, and
o Inference design.
Shells
o A shell is nothing but an expert system without knowledge base.
o A shell provides the developers with knowledge acquisition,
o inference engine,
o user interface, and
o Explanation facility.
For example, few shells are given below
o Java Expert System Shell (JESS) that provides fully developed Java API for creating an expert
system.
Vidwan, a shell developed at the National Centre for Software Technology, Mumbai in 1993. It
enables knowledge encoding in the form of IF-THEN rules
Representing and Using Domain Knowledge
• Expert systems are complex AI programs.
• The most widely used way of representing domain knowledge in expert systems is as a set of
production rules, which are often coupled with a frame system that defines the objects that occur in the
rules.
• MYCIN is one example of an expert system rule.
• All the rules we show are English versions of the actual rules that the systems use.
RI (sometimes are called XCON) is a program that configures DEC VAX systems.
Its rules look like this:
Notice that RI’s rules, unlike MYCIN’s, contain no numeric measures of certainty.
In the task domain with which RI deals, it is possible to state exactly the correct thing to be done in
each particular set of circumstances.
One reason for this is that there exists a good deal of human expertise in this area.
Another is that since RI is doing a design task, it is not necessary to consider all possible
alternatives; one good one is enough. As a result, probabilistic information is not necessary in RI.
PROSPECTOR is a program that provides advice on mineral exploration. Its rules look like this:
DESIGN ADVISOR is a system that critiques chip designs. Its rules look like:
This gives advice to a chip designer, who can accept or reject the advice.
If the advice is rejected,, the system can exploit a justification-based truth maintenance system to
revise its model of the circuit.
The first rule shown here says that an element should be criticized for poor reset ability if the
sequential level count is greater than two, unless its signal is currently believed to be resettable.
For example, MYCIN used backward chaining to discover what organisms were present; then it used
forward chaining to reason from the organisms to a treatment regime.
RI, on the other hand, used forward chaining.
As the field of expert systems matures, more systems that exploit other kinds of reasoning mechanisms
are being developed.
The DESIGN ADVISOR is an example of such a system; in addition to exploiting rules, it makes extensive
use of a justification-based truth maintenance system.
EXPERT SYSTEM SHELLS
Initially, each expert system that was built was created from scratch, usually in LISP.
In particular, since the systems were constructed as a set of declarative representations combined with
an interpreter for those representations, it was possible to separate the interpreter from the domain
specific knowledge and thus to create a system that could be used to construct new expert systems by
adding new knowledge corresponding to the new problem domain.
The resulting interpreters are called shells. One influential example of such a shell is EMYCIN (for
empty MYCIN) which was derived from MYCIN
There are now several commercially available shells that serve as the basis for many of the expert
systems currently being built.
These shells provide much greater flexibility in representing knowledge and in reasoning with it than
MYCIN did.
They typically support rules, frames, truth maintenance systems, and a variety of other reasoning
mechanisms.
Early expert systems shells provided mechanisms for knowledge representation, reasoning and
explanation.
But as experience with using these systems to solve real world problem grew, it became clear that
expert system shells needed to do something else as well.
They needed to make it easy to integrate expert systems with other kinds of programs.
EXPLANATION
In order for an expert system to be an effective tool, people must be able to interact with it easily. To
facilitate this interaction, the expert system must have the following two capabilities in addition to the
ability to perform its underlying task:
Explain its reasoning:
o In many of the domains in which expert systems operate, people will not accept results unless they
have been convinced of the accuracy of the reasoning process that produced those results.
o This is particularly true, for example, in medicine, where a doctor must accept ultimate responsibility
for a diagnosis, even if that diagnosis was arrived at with considerable help from a program.
Acquire new knowledge and modifications of old knowledge:
o Since expert systems derive their power from the richness of the knowledge bases they exploit, it is
extremely important that those knowledge bases be as complete and as accurate as possible.
o One way to get this knowledge into a program is through interaction with the human expert. Another
way is to have the program learn expert behavior from raw data.
KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION
The success of any expert system majorly depends on the quality, completeness, and accuracy of the
information stored in the knowledge base.
The knowledge base is formed by readings from various experts, scholars, and the Knowledge
Engineers.
The knowledge engineer is a person with the qualities of empathy, quick learning, and case
analyzing skills.
He acquires information from subject expert by recording, interviewing, and observing him at work,
etc.
He then categorizes and organizes the information in a meaningful way, in the form of IF-THEN-
ELSE rules, to be used by interference machine.
The knowledge engineer also monitors the development of the ES.