Artificial Intelligence

1. Introduction
The field itself is an emerging area of computer sciences and a lot of work is underway in order
to mature the concepts of this field.
To define AI, let us first try to understand that what is Intelligence?

1.1 What is Intelligence?

If you were asked a simple question; how can we define Intelligence, many of you would
exactly know what it is but most of you won’t exactly be able to define it.
Is it something tangible? We all know that it does exist but what actually it is.
Some of us will attribute intelligence to living beings and would be of the view that all
living species are intelligent.
But how about these plants and trees, they are living species but are they also intelligent? So
can we say that Intelligence is a trait of some living species?
Let us try to understand the phenomena of intelligence by using a few examples.
Consider the following image where a mouse is trying to search a maze in order to find its
way from the bottom left to the piece of cheese in the top right corner of the image.

This problem can be considered as a common real life problem which we deal with many times
in our life, i.e. finding a path, may be to a university, to a friend’s house, to a market, or in
this case to the piece of cheese. The mouse tries various paths as shown by arrows and can
reach the cheese by more than one path. In other words the mouse can find more than one
solutions to this problem. The mouse was intelligent enough to find a solution to the problem
at hand. Hence the ability of problem solving demonstrates intelligence

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Let us consider another problem. Consider the sequence of numbers below:
1, 3, 7, 13, 21, ___
If you were asked to find the next number in the sequence what would be your answer? Just to
help you out in the answer let us solve it for you “adding the next even number to the” i.e. if
we add 2 to 1 we get 3, then we add 4 to 3 we get 7, then we get 6 to 7 we get 13, then we add
8 to 13 we get 21 and finally if we’ll add 10 to 21 we’ll get 31 as the answer. Again answering
the question requires a little bit intelligence. The characteristic of intelligence comes in when
we try to solve something, we check various ways to solve it, we check different combinations,
and many other things to solve different problems.

All this thinking, this memory manipulation capability, this numerical processing ability
and a lot of other things add to ones intelligence.
All of you have experienced your college life. It was very easy for us to look at the timetable
and go to the respective classes to attend them. Not even caring that how that time table was
actually developed. In simple cases developing such a timetable is simple. But in cases
where we have 100s of students studying in different classes, where we have only a few
rooms and limited time to schedule all those classes.

This gets tougher and tougher. The person who makes the timetable has to look into all the time
schedule, availability of the teachers, availability of the rooms, and many other things to fit all
the items correctly within a fixed span of time. He has to look into many expressions and
thoughts like “If room A is free AND teacher B is ready to take the class AND the students of
the class are not studying any other course at that time” THEN “the class can be scheduled”.
This is a fairly simple one, things get complex as we add more and more parameters e.g. if we
were to consider that teacher B might teach more than one course and he might just prefer to
teach in room C and many other things like that. The problem gets more and more complex.
We are pretty much

sure than none of us had ever realized the complexity through which our teachers go through
while developing these schedules for our classes. However, like we know such time tables can
be developed. All this information has to reside in the developer’s brain. His intelligence helps
him to create such a schedule. Hence the ability to think, plan and schedule demonstrate
intelligence.

Consider a doctor, he checks many patients daily, diagnoses their disease gives them medicine
and prescribes them behaviours that can help them to get cured. Let us think a little and try to
understand that what actually he does. Though checking a patient and diagnosing the disease
is much more complex but we’ll try to keep our discussion very simple and will intentionally
miss out stuff from this discussion.

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A person goes to doctor, tells him that he is not feeling well. The doctor asks him a few
questions to clarify the patient’s situation. The doctor takes a few measurements to check the
physical status of the person. These measurements might just include the temperature (T),
Blood Pressure (BP), Pulse Rate (PR) and things like that. For simplicity let us consider that
some doctor only checks these measurements and tries to come up with a diagnosis for the
disease. He takes these measurements and based on his previous knowledge he tries to diagnose
the disease. His previous knowledge is based on rules like: “If the patient has a

high BP and normal T and normal PR then he is not well”. “If only the BP is normal then what
ever the other measurements may be the person should be healthy”, and many such other rules.
The key thing to notice is that by using such rules the doctor might classify a person to be
healthy or ill and might as well prescribe different medicines to him using the information
observed from the measurements according to his previous knowledge. Diagnosing a disease
has many other complex information and observations involved, we have just mentioned a
very toy case here. However, the doctor is actually faced with solving a problem of diagnosis
having looked at some specific measurements. It is important to consider that a doctor who
would have a better memory to store all this precious knowledge, better ability of
retrieving the correct portion of the knowledge for the correct patient will be better able
to classify a patient. Hence, telling us that memory and correct and efficient memory and
information manipulation also counts towards ones intelligence.

Things are not all that simple. People don’t think about problems in the same manner. Let us
give you an extremely simple problem. Just tell us about your height. Are you short, medium
or tall? An extremely easy question! Well you might just think that you are tall but your friend
who is taller than you might say that NO! You are not. The point being that some people might
have such a distribution in their mind that people having height around 4ft are short, around 5ft
are medium and around 6ft are tall. Others might have this distribution that

people having height around 4.5ft are short, around 5.5ft are medium and around 6.5ft are tall.
Even having the same measurements different people can get to completely different results as
they approach the problem in different fashion. Things can be even more complex when the
same person, having observed same measurements solves the same problem in two different
ways and reaches different solutions. But we all know that we answer such fuzzy questions
very efficiently in our daily lives. Our intelligence actually helps us do this. Hence the
ability to tackle ambiguous and fuzzy problems demonstrates intelligence.
Can you recognize a person just by looking at his/her fingerprint? Though we all know that
every human has a distinct pattern of his/her fingerprint but just by looking at a fingerprint
image a human generally can’t just tell that this print must be of person XYZ. On the other
hand having distinct fingerprint is really important information as it serves as a unique ID for
all the humans in this world.

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Let us just consider 5 different people and ask a sixth one to have a look at different images of
their fingerprints. We ask him to somehow learn the patterns, which make the five prints
distinct in some manner. After having seen the images a several times, that sixth person might
get to find something that is making the prints distinct. Things like one of them has fever lines
in the print, the other one has sharply curved lines, some might have larger distance between
the lines in the print and some might have smaller displacement between the lines and many
such features. The point being that after some time, which may be in hours or days or may be
even months, that sixth person will be able to look at a new fingerprint of one of those five
persons and he might with some degree of accuracy recognize that which one amongst the five
does it belong. Only with 5 people the problem was hard to solve. His intelligence helped him
to learn the features that distinguish one finger print from the other. Hence the ability to learn
and recognize demonstrates intelligence.

Let us give one last thought and then will get to why we have discussed all this. A lot of us
regularly watch television. Consider that you switch off the volume of your TV set. If you are
watching a VU lecture you will somehow perceive that the person standing in front of you is
not singing a song, or anchoring a musical show or playing some sport. So just by observing
the sequence of images of the person you are able to perceive meaningful information out of
the video. Your intelligence helped you to perceive and understand what was happening on the
TV.
Hence the ability to understand and perceive demonstrates intelligence.
1.2 Intelligent Machines
Based on the above definition of intelligence, let’s informally define the field of Artificial
Intelligence.

What if?
A machine searches through a mesh and finds a path?
A machine solves problems like the next number in the sequence?
A machine develops plans?
A machine diagnoses and prescribes?
A machine answers ambiguous question?
A machine recognizes fingerprints?
A machine understands?
A machine perceives?
A machine does MANY MORE SUCH THINGS!
A machine behaves as HUMANS do? HUMANOID!!!
We will have to call such a machine Intelligent. Is this real or natural intelligence? NO! This is
Artificial Intelligence.

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1.3 Formal Definitions for Artificial Intelligence
In their book “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
comment on artificial intelligence in a very comprehensive manner. They present the
definitions of artificial intelligence according to eight recent textbooks. These definitions can
be broadly categorized under two themes. The ones in the left column of the table below are
concerned with thought process and reasoning, where as the ones in the right column address
behavior.

To make computers think like humans we first need to devise ways to determine that how
humans think. This is not that easy. For this we need to get inside the actual functioning of the
human brain. There are two ways to do this:
• Introspection: that is trying to catch out own thoughts as they go by.
• Psychological Experiments: that concern with the study of science of mental life.
Once we accomplish in developing some sort of comprehensive theory that how humans
think, only then can we come up with computer programs that follow the same rules. The
interdisciplinary field of cognitive science brings together computer models from AI and
experimental techniques from psychology to try to construct precise and testable theories of
the working of human mind.

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The issue of acting like humans comes up when AI programs have to interact with people or
when they have to do something physically which human usually do in real life. For instance
when a natural language processing system makes a dialog with a person, or when some
intelligent software gives out a medical diagnosis, or when a robotic arm sorts out
manufactured goods over a conveyer belt and many other such scenarios. Keeping in view all
the above motivations let us give a fairly comprehensive comment that Artificial
Intelligence is an effort to create systems that can learn, think, perceive, analyze and act
in the same manner as real humans.
People have also looked into understanding the phenomena of Artificial Intelligence from a
different view point. They call this strong and weak AI.
Strong AI means that machines act intelligently and they have real conscious minds. Weak AI
says that machines can be made to act as if they are intelligent.
That is Weak AI treats the brain as a black box and just emulates its functionality. While strong
AI actually tries to recreate the functions of the inside of the brain as opposed to simply
emulating behavior.
The concept can be explained by an example. Consider you have a very intelligent machine
that does a lot of tasks with a lot of intelligence. On the other hand you have very trivial specie
e.g. a cat. If you throw both of them into a pool of water, the cat will try to save her life and
would swim out of the pool. The “intelligent” machine would die out in the water without any
effort to save itself.
The mouse had strong Intelligence, the machine didn’t. If the machine has strong artificial
intelligence, it would have used its knowledge to counter for this totally new situation in its
environment. But the machine only knew what we taught it or in other wards only knew what
was programmed into it. It never had the inherent capability of intelligence which would have
helped it to deal with this new situation.
Most of the researchers are of the view that strong AI can’t actually ever be created and what
ever we study and understand while dealing with the field of AI is related to weak AI. A few
are also of the view that we can get to the essence of strong AI as well. However it is a standing
debate but the purpose was to introduce you with another aspect of thinking about the field.

1.4 History and Evolution of Artificial Intelligence

AI is a young field. It has inherited its ideas, concepts and techniques from many disciplines
like philosophy, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, biology etc.
From over a long period of traditions in philosophy theories of reasoning and learning have
emerged.
From over 400 years of mathematics, we have formal theories of logic, probability, decision-
making and computation.
From psychology we have the tools and techniques to investigate the human mind and ways
to represent the resulting theories.

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Linguistics provides us with the theories of structure and meaning of language.

From biology we have information about the network structure of a human brain and all
the theories on functionalities of different human organs.

Finally from computer science we have tools and concepts to make AI a reality.

1.4.1 First recognized work on AI

-- was done by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943). Their work based on three
sources:
• the basic physiology and function of neurons in the human brain
• the prepositional logic
• The Turing’s theory of computation
The proposed an artificial model of the human neuron. Their model proposed a human
neuron to be a bi-state element i.e. on or off and that the state of the neuron depending on
response to stimulation by a sufficient number of neighboring neurons. They showed, for
example, that some network of connected neurons could compute any computable function,
and that all the logical connectives can be implemented by simple net structures. They also
suggested that suitably connected networks can also learn but they didn’t pursue this idea
much at that time. Donald Hebb (1949) demonstrated a simple updating rules for the modifying
the connection strengths between neurons, such that learning could take place.
1.4.2 The name of the field as “Artificial Intelligence”
In 1956 some of the U.S researchers got together and organized a two-month workshop at
Dartmouth. There were altogether only 10 attendees. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon actually
dominated the workshop. Although all the researchers had some excellent ideas and a few even
had some demo programs like checkers, but Newell and Herbert already had a reasoning
program, the Logic Theorist. The program came up with proofs for logic theorems. The
Dartmouth workshop didn’t lead to any new breakthroughs, but it did all the major people who
were working in the field to each other. Over the next twenty years these people, their students
and colleagues at MIT, CMU, Stanford and IBM, dominated the field of artificial intelligence.
The most lasting and memorable thing that came out of that workshop was an agreement to
adopt the new name for the field: Artificial Intelligence. So this was when the term was
actually coined.
1.4.3 First program that thought humanly
In the early years AI met drastic success. The researchers were highly motivated to try out AI
techniques to solve problems that were not yet been solved. Many of them met great successes.
Newell and Simon’s early success was followed up with the General Problem Solver. Unlike
Logic Theorist, this program was developed in the manner that it attacked a problem
imitating the steps that human take when solving a problem. Though it catered for a limited
class of problems but it was found out that it addressed those problems in a way very similar

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to that as humans. It was probably the first program that imitated human thinking
approach. 1.4.4 Development of Lisp

In 1958 In MIT AI Lab,

McCarthy defined the high-level language Lisp that became the dominant AI programming
language in the proceeding years. Though McCarthy had the required tools with him to
implement programs in this language but access to scarce and expensive computing resources
were also a serious problem. Thus he and other researchers at MIT invented time sharing. Also
in 1958 he published a paper titled Programs with Common Sense, in which he mentioned
Advice Taker a hypothetical that can be seen as the first complete AI system. Unlike the
other systems at that time, it was to cater for the general knowledge of the world. For example
he showed that how some simple rules could help a program generate a plan to drive to an
airport and catch the plane.

1.4.5 Microworlds

Marvin Minsky (1963), a researcher at MIT supervised a number of students who choose
limited problems that appeared to require intelligence to solve. These limited domains
became known as Microworlds. Some of them developed programs that solved calculus
problems; some developed programs, which were able to accept input statements in a very
restricted subset of English language, and generated answers to these statements. An example
statement and an answer can be:

Statement:

If Ali is 2 years younger than Umar and Umar is 23 years old. How old is Ali?
Answer:
Ali is 21 years old.
In the same era a few researchers also met significant successes in building neural networks.

1.4.6 Researchers started to realize problems

In the beginning the AI researchers very confidently predicted their upcoming successes.
Herbert Simon in 1957 said:
It is not my aim to surprise of shock you -- but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that
there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their
ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until -- in a visible future – the range of
problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which human mind has been
applied

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 In 1958 he predicted that computers would be chess champions, and an important new
mathematical theorem would be proved by machine. But over the years it was revealed that
such statements and claims were really optimistic. A major problem that AI researchers started
to realize was that though their techniques worked fairly well on one or two simple examples
but most of them turned out to fail when tried out on wider selection of problems and on more
difficult tasks.
One of the problems was that early programs often didn’t have much knowledge of their
subject matter, and succeeded by means of simple syntactic manipulations e.g. Weizenbaum’s
ELIZA program (1965), which could apparently engage in serious conversation on any topic,
actually just borrowed and manipulated the sentences typed into it by a human. Many of the
language translation programs tried to translate sentences by just a replacement of words
without having catered for the context in which they were used, hence totally failing to maintain
the subject matter in the actual sentence, which was to be [Link] famous retranslation
of “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” as “the vodka is good but the meat is rotten”
illustrates the difficulties encountered.
Second kind of difficulty was that many problems that AI was trying to solve were
intractable. Most of the AI programs in the early years tried to attack a problem by finding
different combinations in which a problem can be solved and then combined different
combinations and steps until the right solution was found. This didn’t work always. There
were many intractable problems in which this approach failed.
A third problem arose because of the fundamental limitations on the basic structures being
used to generate intelligent behavior.

For example in 1969, Minsky and Papert’s book Perceptrons proved that although perceptrons
could be shown to learn anything they were capable of representing, they could represent very
little. However, in brief different happenings made the researchers realize that as they tried
harder and more complex problem the pace of their success decreased so they now refrained
from making highly optimistic statements.
1.4.7 AI becomes part of Commercial Market
Even after realizing the basic hurdles and problems in the way of achieving success in this field,
the researchers went on exploring grounds and techniques. The first successful commercial
expert system, R1, began operation at Digital Equipment Corporation (McDermott, 1982).
The program basically helped to configure the orders for new computer systems. Consider
expert systems as a programs that somehow solves a certain problem by using previously stored
information about some rules and fact of the domain to which that problem belongs.
In 1981, the Japanese announced the “Fifth Generation” project, a 10-year plan to build
intelligent computers running Prolog in much the same way that ordinary computers run
the machine code. The project proposed to achieve full-scale natural language
understanding along with many other ambitious goals. However, by this time people began
to invest in this field and many AI projects got commercially funded and accepted.

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1.4.8 Neural networks reinvented
Although computer science had rejected this concept of neural networks after Minsky and
Papert’s Perceptrons book, but in 1980s at least four different groups reinvented the back
propagation learning algorithm which was first found in 1969 by Bryson and Ho. The
algorithm was applied to many learning problem in computer science and the wide spread
dissemination of the results in the collection Parallel Distributed Processing (Rumelhart and
McClelland, 1986) caused great excitement.
People tried out the back propagation neural networks as a solution to many learning
problems and met great success.

The diagram above summarizes the history and evolution of AI in a comprehensive shape.

1.5 Applications
Artificial finds its application is a lot of areas not only related to computer sciences but many
other fields as well. We will briefly mention a few of the application areas as follows:

Many information retrieval systems like Google search engine uses artificially intelligent
crawlers and content based searching techniques to efficiency and accuracy of the
information retrieval.
A lot of computer based games like chess, 3D combat games even many arcade games use
intelligent software to make the user feel as if the machine on which that game is running is
intelligent.
Computer Vision is a new area where people are trying to develop the sense of visionary
perception into a machine. Computer vision applications help to establish tasks which
previously required human vision capabilities [Link] human faces, understanding

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images and to interpret them, analyzing medical scan and innumerable amount of other
tasks.

Natural language processing is another area which tries to make machines speak and
interact with humans just like humans themselves. This requires a lot from the field of
Artificial Intelligence.
Expert systems form probably the largest industrial applications of AI. Software like MYCIN
and XCON/R1 has been successfully employed in medical and manufacturing industries
respectively.
Robotics again forms a branch linked with the applications of AI where people are trying
to develop robots which can be rather called as humanoids. Organizations have developed
robots that act as pets, visitor guides etc.

In short there are vast applications of the field and a lot of research work is going on around
the globe in the sub-branches of the field.
1.6 Summary
• Intelligence can be understood as a trait of some living species
• Many factors and behaviors contribute to intelligence
• Intelligent machines can be created
• To create intelligent machines we first need to understand how the real
• brain functions
• Artificial intelligence deals with making machines think and act like
• humans
• It is difficult to give one precise definition of AI
• History of AI is marked by many interesting happenings through which the
fieldgradually evolved
• In the early years people made optimistic claims about AI but soon they realized thatit’s
not all that smooth
• AI is employed in various different fields like gamming, business, law,
medicine,engineering, robotics, computer vision and many other fields.
• AI has enormous room for research and posses a diverse future

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