Introduction to AI

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 What is AI?
an attempt
of
▪ AI is the reproduction of human
reasoning and intelligent behavior by
computational methods
Intellige
nt
behavior Compute
r

Humans
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 What is AI?
(R&N)

Discipline that systematizes and

automates reasoning processes to create
machines that:
Act like humans Act rationally
Think like humans Think rationally

A human Centered approach must be an empirical Science,

involving Hypothesis and Experimental Confirmation.
A rationalist approach involves a combination of mathematics and
engineering.

A system is rational if it does the ”right thing” given what it knows. 4

 Act like humans Act rationally
Think like humans Think rationally

▪ The goal of AI is to create computer systems that

perform tasks regarded as requiring intelligence
when done by humans
▪ 🡪 AI Methodology: Take a task at which people are
better, e.g.:
• Prove a theorem
• Play chess
• Plan a surgical operation
• Diagnose a disease
• Navigate in a building
and build a computer system that does it
automatically
▪ But do we want to duplicate human imperfections?
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 Why AI
• Solve real world problems very easily and
accurately such as health issue ,
marketing, traffic issue etc.
• Create personal virtual assistant like siri,
google assistance.
• Robot which can work in a environment
where survival of human can be at risk

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 Goals of AI
• Replicate Human Intelligence
• Solve Knowledge –intensive task
• An intelligent connection of perception and
action
• Building a m/c which can perform task that
requires human intelligence such as:
– Providing theorem
– Playing chess
– Plan surgical operation
– Driving a car
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Intelligence Composed of

Linguistic
Reasoning Intelligence Intelligence

Problem
Solving
Learning
Perception

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 Can Machines Act/Think
Intelligently?
“If there were machines which bore a resemblance
to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as
possible for all practical purposes, we should still
have two very certain means of recognizing that
they were not real men. The first is that they could
never use words, or put together signs, as we do in
order to declare our thoughts to others… Secondly,
even though some machines might do some things
as well as we do them, or perhaps even better,
they would inevitably fail in others, which would
reveal that they are acting not from understanding,
…”
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Discourse on the Method, by Descartes (1598-1650)

 Can Machines Act/Think
Intelligently?
Turing Test: Acting humanly
▪ [Link]
▪ Test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 was
designed to provide a satisfactory
operational definition of intelligence.
▪ The computer is asked questions by a
human interrogator. It passes the test if the
interrogator cannot tell whether the
responses come from a person or not
▪ No physical interaction
▪ Chinese Room (J. Searle)

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The computer would need to possess the following
capabilities:
⮚ natural language processing to enable it to
communicate successfully in English (or some other human
language);
⮚ knowledge representation to store information provided
before or during the interrogation;
⮚ automated reasoning to use the stored information to
answer questions and to draw new conclusions;
⮚ machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to
detect and extrapolate patterns.
⮚ computer vision to perceive objects, and
⮚ robotics to move them about

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 Thinking Humanly: The
cognitive approach
• "Can machines think?" 🡪 "Can machines behave intelligently
• 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 workings of the human mind.
GPS : general problem solver
• There are two ways to do this:
❑ Introspection—trying to catch our own thoughts as they go
by
❑ psychological experiments.

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 Thinking Rationally
Codify ”Right Thinking”
logic

• The development of formal which , provided a precise

notation for statements about all kinds of things in the
world and the relations between them.
• There are two main obstacles to this approach.
❑ It is not easy to take informal knowledge and state it in the
formal terms required by logical notation.
❑ There is a big difference between being able to solve a
problem "in principle" and doing so in practice.

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 Acting Rationally rational
agent

• Acting rationally means acting so as to achieve one's goals,

given one's beliefs. An agent is just something that
perceives and acts.
• It act to achieve best outcome or when there is a
uncertainty the best expected outcome.

low of thought : correct inferences

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 Academic Disciplines relevant to AI
• Philosophy Logic, methods of reasoning, mind as physical
system, foundations of learning, language,
rationality.

• Mathematics Formal representation and proof, algorithms,

computation, (un)decidability, (in)tractability

• Probability/Statisticsmodeling uncertainty, learning from data

• Economics utility, decision theory, rational economic agents
• Neuroscience neurons as information processing units.
• Psychology/ how do people behave, perceive, process cognitive
Cognitive Science information, represent knowledge.

• Computer building fast computers

engineering

• Control theory design systems that maximize an objective

function over time

• Linguistics knowledge representation, grammars 15

 Main Areas of AI
▪ Knowledge
representation (including Agen Perceptio
formal logic) t
Robotic n
▪ Search, especially s
heuristic search (puzzles, Reasonin
games) g Searc
▪ Planning h Learnin
▪ Reasoning under g
uncertainty, including Knowled Constraint
probabilistic reasoning Plannin ge satisfaction
▪ Learning g rep.
▪ Agent architectures
▪ Robotics and perception Natural
.. Expert
▪ Natural language langua
. System
processing ge
s 16
 History of AI
• 1943: early beginnings
– McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain

• 1950: Turing
– Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence“ ,therein introduced
tuning test , machine learning , genetic and reinforcement learning algo

• 1956: birth of AI
– McCarthy : Dartmouth college meeting: "Artificial Intelligence“ name
adopted

• 1950s: initial promise

– Early AI programs, including
– Samuel's checkers program
– Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist

• 1955-65: “great enthusiasm”

– Newell and Simon: GPS, general problem solver
– Gelertner: Geometry Theorem Prover
– McCarthy: invention of LISP
 History of AI
• 1966—73: Reality dawns
– Realization that many AI problems are intractable
– Limitations of existing neural network methods identified
• Neural network research almost disappears

• 1969—85: Adding domain knowledge

– Development of knowledge-based systems
– Success of rule-based expert systems,
• E.g., DENDRAL, MYCIN
• But were brittle and did not scale well in practice

• 1986-- Rise of machine learning

– Neural networks return to popularity
– Major advances in machine learning algorithms and applications

• 1990-- Role of uncertainty

– Bayesian networks as a knowledge representation framework

• 1995-- AI as Science
– Integration of learning, reasoning, knowledge representation
– AI methods used in vision, language, data mining, etc
 The State of The Art
• Game Playing: Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess
champion Garry Kasparov in 1997

• Autonomous Planning and Scheduling: NASA's on-board

autonomous planning program controlled the scheduling of
operations for a spacecraft

• Autonomous Control:ALVINN computer vision was trained to

steer a car to keep in lane. No hands across America
(driving autonomously 98% of the time from Pittsburgh to
San Diego)

• Logistics Planning: During the 1991 Gulf War, US forces

deployed an AI logistics planning and scheduling program
(DART) that involved up to 50,000 vehicles, cargo, and
people

• Language Understanding and Problem Solving: Proverb

solves crossword puzzles better than most humans
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• Diaganosis:Medical diagnosis based on probabilistic
 Consider what might be involved
in building a “intelligent”
computer….
• What are the “components” that might be useful?

– Fast hardware?
– Foolproof software?
– Chess-playing at grandmaster level?
– Speech interaction?
• speech synthesis
• speech recognition
• speech understanding
– Image recognition and understanding ?
– Learning?
– Planning and decision-making?

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 Can we build hardware as
complex as the brain?
• How complicated is our brain?
– a neuron, or nerve cell, is the basic information processing unit
– estimated to be on the order of 10 11 neurons in a human brain
– many more synapses (10 14) connecting these neurons
– cycle time: 10 -3 seconds (1 millisecond)

• How complex can we make computers?

– 106 or more transistors per CPU
– supercomputer: hundreds of CPUs, 10 9
bits of RAM
– cycle times: order of 10 - 8 seconds

• Conclusion
– YES: in the near future we can have computers with as many basic processing
elements as our brain, but with
• far fewer interconnections (wires or synapses) than the brain
• much faster updates than the brain
– but building hardware is very different from making a computer behave like a
brain!

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 Must an Intelligent System be
Foolproof?
• A “foolproof” system is one that never makes an error:
– Types of possible computer errors
• hardware errors, e.g., memory errors
• software errors, e.g., coding bugs
• “human-like” errors
– Clearly, hardware and software errors are possible in practice
– what about “human-like” errors?

• An intelligent system can make errors and still be intelligent

– humans are not right all of the time
– we learn and adapt from making mistakes
• e.g., consider learning to surf or ski
– we improve by taking risks and falling
– an intelligent system can learn in the same way

• Conclusion:
– NO: intelligent systems will not (and need not) be foolproof

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Can Computers play Humans at
Chess?
• Chess Playing is a classic AI problem
– well-defined problem
– very complex: difficult for humans to play well
Deep Blue
Garry Kasparov (current World Champion )

Conclusion: YES: today’s computers 23

can beat even the best human
 Can Computers “see”?
• Recognition v. Understanding (like Speech)
– Recognition and Understanding of Objects in a scene
• look around this room
• you can effortlessly recognize objects
• human brain can map 2d visual image to 3d “map”
• Why is visual recognition a hard problem?

Conclusion: mostly NO: computers can only “see” certain

types of objects under limited circumstances: but YES for
certain constrained problems (e.g., face recognition)

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 Can Computers Recognize
Speech?
• Speech Recognition:
– mapping sounds from a microphone into a list of words.
– Hard problem: noise, more than one person talking,
occlusion, speech variability,..
– Even if we recognize each word, we may not understand
its meaning.
• Recognizing single words from a small vocabulary
• systems can do this with high accuracy (order of
99%)
• e.g., directory inquiries
– limited vocabulary (area codes, city names)
– computer tries to recognize you first, if
unsuccessful hands you over to a human operator
– saves millions of dollars a year for the phone 25
companies
 Recognizing human speech
(ctd.)
• Recognizing normal speech is much more difficult
– speech is continuous: where are the boundaries between
words?
• e.g., “John’s car has a flat tire”
– large vocabularies
• can be many tens of thousands of possible words
• we can use context to help figure out what someone
said
– try telling a waiter in a restaurant:
“I would like some dream and sugar in my
coffee”
– background noise, other speakers, accents, colds, etc
– on normal speech, modern systems are only about 60%
accurate
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• Conclusion: NO, normal speech is too complex to accurately
 Can Computers Understand
speech?
• Understanding is different to recognition:
– “Time flies like an arrow”
• assume the computer can recognize all the words
• but how could it understand it?
– 1. time passes quickly like an arrow?
– 2. command: time the flies the way an arrow times the
flies
– 3. command: only time those flies which are like an
arrow
– 4. “time-flies” are fond of arrows
• only 1. makes any sense, but how could a computer figure
this out?
– clearly humans use a lot of implicit commonsense
knowledge in communication
• Conclusion: NO, much of what we say is beyond the capabilities of
a computer to understand at present 27