Definitions
Humanly Rationally
Thinking humanly — cognitive Thinking rationally — the use of logic. Need
modeling. Systems should solve to worry about modeling uncertainty and
Thinking
problems the same way humans dealing with complexity.
do.
Acting humanly — the Turing Acting rationally — the study of rational
Test approach. agents: agents that maximize the expected
Acting
value of their performance measure given what
they currently know.
AI Engineering: Intelligent Agents
An agent is something that senses and acts.
• Agents can be organic, robotic, or pure software.
• Not all agents are intelligent.
• Intelligent agents are agents that can operate autonomously in complex
environments.
• AI is concerned with the production of intelligent agents.
Acting humanly:” The Turing Test approach”
• The legendary computer scientist and mathematician, Alan Turing,
proposed the Turing Test to provide a definition of intelligence. It
is a test to see if a computer can learn to mimic human behavior.
He defined intelligent behavior as the ability to achieve human-
level intelligence during a conversation. This performance should
be sufficient to trick an interrogator into thinking that the answers
are coming from a human.
• To see if a machine can do this, he proposed a test setup: he
proposed that a human should interrogate the machine through a
text interface. Another constraint is that the human cannot know
who’s on the other side of the interrogation, which means it can
either be a machine or a human. To enable this setup, a human will
be interacting with two entities through a text interface. These two
entities are called respondents. One of them will be a human and
the other one will be the machine.
• The respondent machine passes the test if the interrogator is unable
to tell whether the answers are coming from a machine or a human.
The following diagram shows the setup of a Turing Test:
As you can imagine, this is quite a difficult task for the respondent machine.
There are a lot of things going on during a conversation. At the very
minimum, the machine needs to be well versed with the following things:
• Natural Language Processing: The machine needs this to
communicate with the interrogator. The machine needs to parse
the sentence, extract the context, and give an appropriate answer.
• Knowledge Representation: The machine needs to store the
information provided before the interrogation. It also needs to keep
track of the information being provided during the conversation so
that it can respond appropriately if it comes up again.
• Reasoning: It’s important for the machine to understand how to
interpret the information that gets stored. Humans tend to do this
automatically to draw conclusions in real time.
• Machine Learning: This is needed so that the machine can adapt
to new conditions in real time. The machine needs to analyze and
detect patterns so that it can draw inferences.
Thinking humanly: The cognitive modeling approach
Once we gather enough data, we can create a model to simulate the human
process. This model can be used to create software that can think like
humans. Of course this is easier said than done! All we care about is the
output of the program given a particular input. If the program behaves in a
way that matches human behavior, then we can say that humans have a
similar thinking mechanism.
Within computer science, there is a field of study called Cognitive
Modeling that deals with simulating the human thinking process. It tries to
understand how humans solve problems. It takes the mental processes that
go into this problem solving process and turns it into a software model. This
model can then be used to simulate human behavior. Cognitive modeling is
used in a variety of AI applications such as deep learning, expert systems,
Natural Language Processing, robotics, and so on.
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
Rationality refers to doing the right thing in a given circumstance.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to attempt to codify
“right thinking,” that is, irrefutable reasoning processes.
His syllogisms (logical reasoning) 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.” These laws of thought were supposed to govern the operation of
the mind; their study initiated the field called logic.
There are two main obstacles to this approach.
1. 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.
2. 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 just something that acts (agent comes from the Latin agere, to
do). Of course, 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.
Rational agents need to be performed in such a way that there is maximum
benefit to the entity performing the action. An agent is said to act rationally
if, given a set of rules, it takes actions to achieve its goals. It just perceives
and acts according to the information that’s available. This system is used a
lot in AI to design robots when they are sent to navigate unknown terrains.
All the skills needed for the Turing Test also allow an agent to act rationally.
Knowledge representation and reasoning enable agents to reach good
decisions. We need to be able to generate comprehensible sentences in
natural language to get by in a complex society.
The rational-agent approach has two advantages over the other
approaches.
1. It is more general than the “laws of thought” approach because correct
inference is just one of several possible mechanisms for achieving
rationality.
2. It is more amenable to scientific development than are approaches based
on human behavior or human thought.