The field of AI attempts to understand intelligent entities (learn more about us).
Unlike philosophy and psychology, AI strives to build intelligent entities as well as
understand them.
Although no one can predict the future in detail, it is clear that computers with human-level
intelligence (or better) would have a huge impact on our everyday lives and on the future
course of civilization.
AI is one of the newest disciplines. Work started after World War II, and the name itself was
coined in 1956.
AI encompasses a huge variety of subfields, ranging from the general (learning and
perception) to the specific, such as playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, writing
poetry, driving a car and diagnosing diseases.
AI is relevant to any intelligent task, and is truly a universal field.
In Figure 1.1 we see eight definitions of AI, laid out along two dimensions.
o The definitions on top are concerned with thought processes and reasoning, whereas
the ones on the bottom address behavior.
o The definitions on the left measure success in terms of fidelity to human performance,
whereas the ones on the right measure against an ideal performance measure, called
rationality.
A system is rational if it does the “right thing,” given what it knows.
Historically, all four approaches to AI have been followed, each by different people with
different methods.
Acting Humanly: The Turing Test Approach
The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing (1950) was designed to provide a satisfactory
operational definition of intelligence.
A computer passes the test if a human interrogator, after posing some written questions,
cannot tell whether the written responses come from a person or from a computer.
Such a computer would need to posses the following capabilities:
o Natural language processing to enable it to communicate successfully in English.
o Knowledge representation to store what it knows or hears.
o Automated reasoning to use the stored information to answer questions and to draw
new conclusions
o Machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate
patterns.
Turing’s test deliberately avoided physical interaction between the interrogator and the
computer, because physical simulation of a person is unnecessary for intelligence.
The total Turing Rest includes a video signal so that the interrogator can test the subject’s
perceptual abilities as well as the opportunity for the interrogator to pass physical objects
“through the hatch.”.
To pass the total Turing Test, the computer will need
o Computer vision to perceive objects, and
o Robotics to manipulate objects and move about.
These six disciplines compose most of AI, and Turing deserves credit for designing a test that
remains relevant 60 years later.
Thinking Humanly: The Cognitive Modeling Approach
If we are going to say that a given program thinks like a human, we must have some way of
determining how humans think.
There are three ways to do this: through introspection-trying to catch our own thoughts as we
they go by; through psychological experiments-observing a person in action; and through
brain imaging-observing the brain in action.
Once we have a sufficiently precise theory of the mind, it becomes possible to express the
theory as a computer program.
Cognitive modeling is an area of computer science that deals with simulating human
problem-solving and mental processing in a computerized model. Such a model can be used
to simulate or predict human behavior or performance on tasks similar to the ones modeled
and improve human-computer interaction.
Cognitive modeling is used in numerous artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such
as expert systems, natural language processing, neural networks, and in robotics and virtual
reality applications.
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: The “Laws of Thought” Approach
Aristotle was the first to formulate a precise set of laws governing the rational part of the
mind. He developed an informal system of syllogisms for proper reasoning, which in
principle allowed one to generate conclusions mechanically, given initial premises.
Formal logic defines a precise notation for statements about all kinds of objects in the world
and the relations among them. (Contrast this with ordinary arithmetic notation, which
provides only for statements about numbers).
In other words, formal logic is the study of logic using special symbols and clearly-defined
rules of reasoning. For example, propositional and predicate logic are the branches of formal
logic.
They are very useful in linguistics, philosophy, artificial intelligence and mathematics. The
tools of formal logic can also help us formulate ideas and arguments more precisely.
There are two main obstacles to this approach.
o First, it is not easy to take informal knowledge and state it in the formal terms
required by logical notation, particularly when the knowledge is less than 100%
certain.
o Second, there is a big difference between solving a problem “in principle” and
solving it “in practice.” Even problems with just a few hundred facts can exhaust the
computational resources of any computer unless it has some guidance as to which
reasoning steps to try first.
Acting Rationally: The Rational Agent Approach
An agent is something that acts. All computer programs do something, but computer agents
are expected to do more: operate autonomously, perceive their environment, persist over a
prolonged time period, adapt to change, and create and pursue goals.
In other words, a rational agent is anything which perceives its environment, takes
actions autonomously in order to achieve goals, and may improve its performance
with learning or may use knowledge.
A rational agent is one that acts so as to achieve the best outcome or, when there is
uncertainty, the best expected outcome.
Foundations of AI (History of AI)