Chapter 1

Introduction to AI

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 Objective
To understand AI and related concept
(Knowledge base and intelligent system)
Understand the components of AI system

Get a feel of application areas of AI

Get a feel of scholars view to define AI

Briefly discuss the difference between Expert

system and other systems

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 What is AI?
 Artificial Intelligence (AI) is usually defined as the science of making
computers do things that require intelligence when done by humans.
 AI has had some success in limited, or simplified, domains.
 However, the five decades since the inception of AI have brought
only very slow progress, and early optimism concerning the
attainment of human-level intelligence has given way to an
appreciation of the profound difficulty of the problem.
 The term AI is first used by John McCarthy (1956) who considers it
to mean the science and engineering of making intelligent machine.

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 What is Intelligence
 Intelligence is a general mental capability that involves the ability to reason, plan, solve
problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn.
 Quite simple human behavior can be intelligent yet quite complex behavior performed by
insects is unintelligent.
 What is the difference? Consider the behavior of the digger wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus.
 When the female wasp brings food to her burrow, she deposits it on the threshold, goes
inside the burrow to check for intruders, and then if the coast is clear carries in the food.
 The unintelligent nature of the wasp's behavior is revealed if the watching experimenter
moves the food a few inches while the wasp is inside the burrow checking. On emerging, the
wasp repeats the whole procedure: she carries the food to the threshold once again, goes in to
look around, and emerges. She can be made to repeat this cycle of behavior upwards of forty
times in succession.
 Intelligence--conspicuously absent in the case of Sphex--is the ability to adapt one's behavior
to fit new circumstances.
 Mainstream thinking in psychology regards human intelligence not as a single ability or
cognitive process but rather as an array of separate components.
 Research in AI has focused chiefly on the following components of intelligence: learning,
reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and language-understanding.
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 Learning
Learning is distinguished into a number of different forms.
The simplest is learning by trial-and-error.
For example, a simple program for solving mate-in-one chess
problems might try out moves at random until one is found
that achieves mate.
The program remembers the successful move and next time
the computer is given the same problem it is able to produce
the answer immediately. The simple memorizing of individual
items--solutions to problems, words of vocabulary, etc.--is
known as rote learning.

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  Rote learning is relatively easy to implement on a computer. More
challenging is the problem of implementing what is called
generalization.
 Learning that involves generalization leaves the learner able to
perform better in situations not previously encountered.
 A program that learns past tenses of regular English verbs by rote will
not be able to produce the past tense of e.g. "jump" until presented at
least once with "jumped", whereas a program that is able to generalize
from examples can learn the "add-ed" rule, and so form the past tense
of "jump" in the absence of any previous encounter with this verb.
 Sophisticated modern techniques enable programs to generalize
complex rules from data.

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 Reasoning
 To reason is to draw inferences appropriate to the situation in hand.
Inferences are classified as either deductive or inductive.
 Deductive: "Fred is either in the museum or the cafe; he isn't in the cafe; so
he's in the museum",
 Inductive: "Previous accidents just like this one have been caused by
instrument failure; so probably this one was caused by instrument failure".
 The difference between the two is that in the deductive case, the truth of the
premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion, whereas in the inductive case,
the truth of the premises lends support to the conclusion that the accident was
caused by instrument failure, but nevertheless further investigation might
reveal that, despite the truth of the premises, the conclusion is in fact false.
 There has been considerable success in programming computers to draw
inferences, especially deductive inferences.
 Reasoning involves drawing inferences that are relevant to the task or
situation in hand.
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 Problem-solving
 Problems have the general form: given such-and-such data, find x. A huge variety
of types of problem is addressed in AI.
 Some examples are: finding winning moves in board games; identifying people
from their photographs; and planning series of movements that enable a robot to
carry out a given task.
 Problem-solving methods divide into special-purpose and general-purpose.
 A special-purpose method is tailor-made for a particular problem, and often
exploits very specific features of the situation in which the problem is embedded.
 A general-purpose method is applicable to a wide range of different problems.
 One general-purpose technique used in AI is means-end analysis, which
involves the step-by-step reduction of the difference between the current state
and the goal state.
 The program selects actions from a list of means--which in the case of, say, a
simple robot, might consist of pickup, putdown, moveforward, moveback,
moveleft, and moveright--until the current state is transformed into the goal
8 state.
 Perception
 In perception the environment is scanned by means of various sense-
organs, real or artificial, and processes internal to the perceiver analyze
the scene into objects and their features and relationships.
 Analysis is complicated by the fact that one and the same object may
present many different appearances on different occasions, depending on
the angle from which it is viewed, whether or not parts of it are projecting
shadows, and so forth.
 At present, artificial perception is sufficiently well advanced to enable a
self-controlled car-like device to drive at moderate speeds on the open
road, and a mobile robot to roam through a suite of busy offices searching
for and clearing away empty soda cans.

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 Language-understanding
 A language is a system of signs having meaning by convention. Traffic signs, for
example, form a mini-language, it being a matter of convention that, for
example, the hazard-ahead sign means hazard ahead.
 This meaning-by-convention that is distinctive of language is very different from
what is called natural meaning, exemplified in statements like 'Those clouds
mean rain' and 'The fall in pressure means the valve is malfunctioning'.
 An important characteristic of full-fledged human languages, such as English,
which distinguishes them from, e.g. bird calls and systems of traffic signs, is
their productivity.
 A productive language is one that is rich enough to enable an unlimited number
of different sentences to be formulated within it.
 It is relatively easy to write computer programs that are able, in severely
restricted contexts, to respond in English, seemingly fluently, to questions and
statements, for example the Parry and Shrdlu programs described in the section
Early AI Programs. However, neither Parry nor Shrdlu actually understands
language.
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 Intelligence is a general mental capability that involves
the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think
abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn.

Intelligence draws on a variety of mental processes,

including memory, learning, perception, decision-
making, thinking, and reasoning.

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 Human Intelligence
 How does our brain work when we solve a problem?
 Do we think it over and suddenly find an answer?
 What do we do when solving a complicated factorization problem, a puzzle or
a mystery?
How do people Reason?
 They create categories and relate one concept to another: Reasoning by analogy:
 From the fact that: A is like B. M is in A. N is in B. Can we say “M is like N”?

 They use specific rules : rule-based reasoning

– if ‘a’ then ’b’ and if ‘b’ then ‘c’  THEN a  b  c
 They use Past Experience – “CASES” (case-based reasoning)
- Similarities of current and previous case
- Store cases using key attributes
 They Use “Expectations” (probabilistic reasoning)
 With the help of previous experience they use Heuristics - “Rule of thumb” to
guess the probability of occurrence of events or guess solution for the problem
at hand.
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 Deductive and inductive reasoning
Deductive reasoning: exact reasoning. It
deals with exact facts and exact
conclusions
Gravity makes things fall. Hence, the apple that
hit my head was due to gravity.

Inductive reasoning: reasoning from a set

of facts or individual cases to a general
conclusion
How much to Buy ? The base costs is X, extra
cost is Y, plus tax is at Z. Hence, it is better to
deal at XYZ.
Can we cut cost ? Heating cost X, lighting Y,
parts Z, total cost is XYZ which is greater than
our revenue R. Hence, we must cut costs.

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 Introduction

The term AI is first used by John McCarthy (1956) who

considers it to mean the science and engineering of making
intelligent machine.

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 Introduction
AI system is used in control, planning, and scheduling,
recognition of handwriting, natural language, speech and
face
Memory of Intelligent system is used to store knowledge
base which is the key for success for artificial intelligent
systems.

AI attempt to understand intelligent entities as well as to

build them in order to understand human behavior.

The idea is to develop an intelligent systems that has

15 human level intelligence or better if possible. 10/10/25
 Introduction cont…
AI system possess
Natural language processing to enable it to communicate
successfully in human language
Knowledge representation to store what it knows or hears
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
Robotics to manipulate objects and move about
And others

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Goals of AI
To make computers more useful by letting
them take over dangerous or tedious tasks
from human
Understand principles of human
intelligence
The Foundation of AI
Philosophy
At that time, the study of human intelligence
began with no formal expression
Initiate the idea of mind as a machine and its
internal operations
The Foundation of AI
Mathematics formalizes the three main
area of AI: computation, logic, and
probability
Computation leads to analysis of the
problems that can be computed
 complexity theory
Probability contributes the “degree of belief”
to handle uncertainty in AI
Decision theory combines probability theory
and utility theory (bias)
The Foundation of AI
Psychology
How do humans think and act?
The study of human reasoning and acting
Provides reasoning models for AI
Strengthen the ideas
 humans and other animals can be considered as
information processing machines
The Foundation of AI
Computer Engineering
How to build an efficient computer?
Provides the artifact that makes AI
application possible
The power of computer makes computation
of large and difficult problems more easily
AI has also contributed its own work to
computer science, including: time-sharing,
the linked list data type, OOP, etc.
The Foundation of AI
Control theory and Cybernetics
How can artifacts operate under their own
control?
The artifacts adjust their actions
 To do better for the environment over time
 Based on an objective function and feedback from
the environment
Not limited only to linear systems but also
other problems
 as language, vision, and planning, etc.
The Foundation of AI
Linguistics
For understanding natural languages
 different approaches has been adopted from the
linguistic work
Formal languages
Syntactic and semantic analysis
Knowledge representation
 Views of defining AI
What is AI (Artificial Intelligence)
Different scholars define AI differently

(A) AI as a system (B) AI as a system

that think humanly that think rationally

Concerned with thought

processing and reasoning Concerned with
behaviors of agents

(C) AI as a system (D) AI as a system

that Act humanly that Act rationally
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 Views of defining AI
measures success of AI in
terms of human being
performance

(A) AI as a system (C) AI as a system

that think humanly that Act humanly

measures success of AI in terms

of ideal concept of intelligence
(rationality)

(B) AI as a system (D) AI as a system

that think rationally that Act rationally
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 Views of defining AI
AI as systems that think humanly
“The automation of activities that we associate with human
thinking, activities such as decision-making, problem
solving, learning …” (Bellman definition, 1978)
“The exciting new effort to make computers think …
machines with minds, in the full and literal sense”
(Haugeland definition, 1985)

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 Thinking humanly: cognitive modeling
 Requires:
 Scientific theories of internal activities of the brain
 How human thinks?

 How to validate a given agent think humanly?

 The answer Requires either
1. Predicting and testing the behavior of human subjects from
his/her thinking point of view (top-down) or
2. Direct identification from neurological data (bottom-up)
 Study on Mental processing logic of human being (cognitive
science) is not yet fertile

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 Views of defining AI
AI as systems that act humanly
“The art of creating machines that perform functions that
require intelligence when performed by people.” (Kurzweil
definition, 1990)
“The study of how to make computers do things at which, at
the moment, people are better.” (Rich and Knight definition,
1991)

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 Acting humanly: Turing Test
 Turing (1950) on his famous paper "Computing machinery and
intelligence":
 "Can machines think?"  "Can machines behave intelligently?"
 Operational test for intelligent behavior: the Imitation Game

Predicted that by 2000, a machine might have a 30% chance

of fooling a person for 5 minutes
Anticipated all major arguments against AI in following 50
years
Active areas of research to achieve this: Machine learning,
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 Introduction cont…
AI as systems that think rationally
A system is said to be rational if it does the “right thing” given what
it knows.
“The study of mental faculties through the use of computational
models.” (Charniak and McDermott definition, 1985)
“The study of the computations that make it possible to perceive,
reason, and act.” (Winston definition, 1992)

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 Thinking rationally: "laws of thought"
 Right thinking is related to irrefutable reasoning process
 Require structure that always gave correct conclusion given
correct premises
 Logic is the key to design and implement an agent that think
rationally
 Several Greek schools developed various forms of logic: notation
and rules of derivation for thoughts;
 Direct line through mathematics and philosophy to modern AI

 Problems:
1. Not all intelligent behavior is mediated by logical deliberation
(unable to take informal knowledge for decision making
process)
2. What is the purpose of thinking? What thoughts should I have?
(there is a big difference between being able to solve a problem
31 “in principle” and doing so “in practice” 10/10/25
 Introduction cont…
AI as systems that act rationally
“Computational intelligence is the study of the design of
intelligent agent” (Poole, et al definition, 1998)
“AI … is concerned with intelligent behavior in artifacts.”
(Nilsson definition, 1998)
The course advocates to agents that act rationally

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 Acting rationally: rational agent
Means acting so as to achieve one’s goals, given one’s
beliefs.
In this approach, AI is viewed as the study and construction
of rational agent
Rational behavior: doing the right thing
The right thing: is the action/decision which is expected to
maximize goal achievement, given the available information
Doesn't necessarily involve thinking
 e.g., blinking reflex
One way of acting rationally is to reason logically to the
action. This indicates, making correct inference is part of
being a rational agent
But rationality doesn’t require correct inference because
some time without having correct thing to do, agent must act
rationally
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 Introduction cont…
AI follows all the four approach but tension existing
between approaches which are centered around human
and rationality.
Human centered approach must be empirical science,
involving hypothesis and experimental confirmation.
confirmation
A rationalist approach involves a combination of
mathematics and engineering
This course focus on the study of a rational agent that
think and act rationally.

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 Some Application areas of AI

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 AI prehistory
 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
 Economics Decision theory
 Neuroscience physical substrate for mental activity
 Psychology phenomena of perception and motor
control, experimental techniques
 Computer building fast computers
engineering
 Control theory design systems that maximize an objective
function over time
 Linguistics knowledge representation, syntax,
grammar
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 History of AI
 Warren McClloch and Walter Pitts (1943)
 1st AI work: Boolean circuit model of the brain
 Drew on three sources
1. Knowledge of the basic physiology and function of neurons in
the brain
2. The formal analysis of propositional logic due to Russell and
Whitehead
3. Turing’s theory of computation
 They proposed a model of artificial neurons
 They showed any computable function could be
computed by some network of connected neurons
 They also suggested that suitably defined networks
could learn

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 History of AI
 Claude Shannon (1950) and Alan Turing (1953)
 Write a chess program

• Marvin Minisky and Dean Edmonds (1951)

 Built the 1st neural network computer

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 History of AI Cont..
Newell and Simon develop a reasoning program called the
Logic Theorist (LT) before Dartmouth workshop

They then come up with the General Problem Solver

(GPS)

GPS, unlike LT, is designed to imitate human problem

solving protocols and it is the 1st program to embody the
“thinking humanly” approach of AI

Herbert Gelernter, 1959 constructed the Geometry

Theorem Prover (GTP)
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 History of AI Cont..
Arthur Samuel, 1952 wrote a series of checker programs
It can learn, which disprove the idea that computer can
only do what they are told to do
His program play better than the creator

John Mcarty, 1958 at MIT

Define the 2nd old high level programming language,
LISP which is the 1st and dominant AI programming
language
Invent time sharing concept with his friend to avoid the
problem of time as a resource.

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 History of AI Cont..
1958 is also marked the year that Marvin Minisky
moved to MIT

Minisky supervised a series of students who choose

limited problems that appeared to require intelligence
to solve (this problems known as Micro world)

The most dominant micro world problem is the block

world

It consists of a set of solid blocks placed on top of the

table
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 Summary on history of AI
 1943 McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain
 1950 Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
 1956 Dartmouth meeting: "Artificial Intelligence" adopted
 1952—69 Look, Ma, no hands!
 1950s Early AI programs, including Samuel's checkers
program, Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist,
Gelernter's Geometry Engine
 1965 Robinson's complete algorithm for logical reasoning
 1966—73 AI discovers computational complexity
Neural network research almost disappears
 1969—79 Early development of knowledge-based systems
 1980-- AI becomes an industry
 1986-- Neural networks return to popularity
 1987-- AI becomes a science
 1995-- The emergence of intelligent agents

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 Some Advantages of Artificial
Intelligence

more powerful and more useful computers

new and improved interfaces
solving new problems
better handling of information
relieves information overload
conversion of information into knowledge
The Disadvantages

increased costs
difficulty with software development - slow and
expensive
few experienced programmers
few practical products have reached the
market as yet.
 Basic Kinds of Systems
 System is a set of components that interact to each other
in a logical way to achieve specific goals.

 There are different types of system based on the services,

the user type, and the method of operations

 Some of the systems includes:

 Information Systems
 Database Management System
 Information Retrieval System
 Expert System

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 Information Systems
Is a system whether automated or manual, that comprises
people, machines, and/or methods organized to collect,
process, transmit, and disseminate data that represent user
information

Provides the information to the appropriate user at the right

time and place.

Data Base Management System

DBMS is a software designed for the purpose of managing a
database
A database is a structured collection of records or data that is
stored in a computer so that a program can consult it to answer
queries.
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 Information Retrieval System
It is the science of
 searching for information in documents,
 searching for documents themselves
 searching for metadata which describe documents, or
 searching within database, whether relational stand-alone databases or
hyper textually-networked databases such as the World Wide Web.
It is used to reduce information overloading

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 Expert system
An expert system, also known as a knowledge based
system, is a computer program that contains some of the
subject-specific (domain specific) knowledge of one or
more human experts.

Is a system with two basic components:

Knowledge base, which model the knowledge of an expert in
the area under consideration
Inference engine

When it is used by non expert user, it can serve as an

expert that guide the user to make an expert decision.
(doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc)

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 Expert system
Examples:
Dendral , MYCIN, PUFF, ELIZA, BTDS, etc.

Dendral expert system:

The primary aim to aid organic chemists with
identification of unknown organic molecules by
analyzing information from mass spectrometry
graphs and the knowledge of chemistry

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 Expert system
MYCIN:
Written in LISP around 1970s and derived from Dendral expert
system
was designed to diagnose infectious blood diseases and
recommend antibiotics, with the dosage adjusted for patient's body
weight
It would query the physician/patient running the program via a
long series of simple yes/no or textual questions.
At the end, it provides
 a list of possible cause bacteria ranked from high to low based on the
probability of each diagnosis,
 its confidence in each diagnosis' probability
 the reasoning behind each diagnosis
It has around ~50 rules

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 Expert system
PUFF:
PUFF can diagnose the presence and severity of lung disease and
produce reports for the patient's file
Is an Expert System that interprets lung function test data and has
become a working tool in the pulmonary physiology lab of a large
number of hospital
Puff went into production at Pacific Medical Center in San
Francisco in 1977.
Several hundred copies have been sold and are in use around the
world.

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 Expert system
ELIZA :
ELIZA is a very well-known artificial intelligence program
designed to emulate a Rogerian psychotherapist.

The basic elements of Carl Rogers' new way of therapy was to

have a more personal relationship with the patient, to help the
patient reach a state of realization that they can help themselves

ELIZA was showcased for a number of years at the MIT AI

Laboratory.
ELIZA has no reasoning ability, cannot learn
ELIZA only appears to understand because "she" uses canned
responses based on keywords, as well as string substitution

Visit and interact with ELIZA at [Link]

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 Expert system
ELIZA :
Eliza: Hello. I am ELIZA. How can I help you?

You: I am Leykun
Eliza: How long have you been Leykun?

You: ten years

Eliza: Please go on.

You: do you know Ethiopia

Eliza: Oh, i know ethiopia.

You: do you understand Amharic

Eliza: Oh, i understand amharic.

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 Strong AI vs. Weak AI
 AI is the concept that it is possible for a machine to think in the
same sense as human do.
 Strong AI: argues that is possible that one day a computer will be
invented which can be called a mind in the fullest sense of the
word. That means,
Computers can think, reason, imagine, etc. and do all the things
that we currently associate with human brain.
 Weak AI: argues that computers can only appear to think and are
not actually conscious in the same way as human brains are.

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 State of the Art
AI Demo

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