Intorduction to

Artificial Intelligence

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 Course classroom page:
 [ schedule, lecture notes, tutorials, assignment,
important announcements]
A Modern Approach Prentice Hall, 2003, Second Edition

 Grading: Minor Test 1: 20 Marks

Minor Test 2: 20 Marks
 End Sem : 45 Marks
 Assignments: 10 Marks
 Attendance : 5 Marks
 Textbook: S. Russell and P. Norvig
Artificial Intelligence:
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 Course overview
 Introduction and Agents (chapters 1,2)
 Problem Solving (chapters 3,4)
 Adversarial Search and Games (chapter 5)
 Constraints processing (chapter 6)
 Uncertainty (chapters 13,14)
 Fuzzy Logic (AB)
 Knowledge, Reasoning and Planning (chapters
7,8,9,11) (RR)
 Evolutionary and Swarm Algorithms (RR)
 Multiobjective Optimization (RR)
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 Course Outline
Resources on the Internet
 AI on the Web: A very comprehensive list of Web
resources about AI from the Russell and Norvig
textbook.

Essays and Papers

 What is AI, John McCarthy
 Computing Machinery and Intelligence, A.M. Turing
 Rethinking Artificial Intelligence, Patrick H.Winston

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Today’s class
 What is Artificial Intelligence?
 A brief History
 Intelligent agents
 State of the art

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 What is Artificial Intelligence
(John McCarthy , Basic Questions)

 What is artificial intelligence?

 It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines,
especially intelligent computer programs.

 Yes, but what is intelligence?

 Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve
goals in the world. Varying kinds and degrees of intelligence
occur in people, many animals and some machines.

 Isn't there a solid definition of intelligence that doesn't

depend on relating it to human intelligence?
 No

 More in: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/node1.html

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 What is AI?
Views of AI fall into four categories:

Thinking humanly Thinking

rationally
Acting humanly Acting rationally

This course advocates "acting rationally“

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 What is Artificial Intelligence ?
• making computers that think?
• the automation of activities we associate with human thinking,
like decision making, learning ... ?
• the art of creating machines that perform functions that
require intelligence when performed by people ?
• the study of mental faculties through the use of computational
models ?
What is Artificial Intelligence ?
• the study of computations that make it possible to
perceive, reason and act ?
• a field of study that seeks to explain and emulate
intelligent behaviour in terms of computational processes ?
• a branch of computer science that is concerned with the
automation of intelligent behaviour ?
• anything in Computing Science that we don't yet know how
to do properly ? (!)
What is Artificial Intelligence ?

THOUGHT Systems that thinkSystems that think

like humans rationally

Systems that act Systems that act

BEHAVIOUR like humans rationally

HUMAN RATIONAL
Systems that act like humans:
Turing Test
• “The art of creating machines that perform functions that
require intelligence when performed by people.”
(Kurzweil)
• “The study of how to make computers do things at which,
at the moment, people are better.” (Rich and Knight)
 Systems that act like humans

?
• You enter a room which has a computer terminal. You
have a fixed period of time to type what you want into the
terminal, and study the replies. At the other end of the
line is either a human being or a computer system.
• If it is a computer system, and at the end of the period
you cannot reliably determine whether it is a system or a
human, then the system is deemed to be intelligent.
 Systems that act like humans

• The Turing Test approach

• a human questioner cannot tell if
• there is a computer or a human answering his question,
via teletype (remote communication)
• The computer must behave intelligently
• Intelligent behavior
• to achieve human-level performance in all cognitive
tasks
Systems that act like humans
• These cognitive tasks include:
• Natural language processing
• for communication with human
• Knowledge representation
• to store information effectively & efficiently
• Automated reasoning
• to retrieve & answer questions using the stored
information
• Machine learning
• to adapt to new circumstances
The total Turing Test
• Includes two more issues:
• Computer vision
• to perceive objects (seeing)
• Robotics
• to move objects (acting)
What is Artificial Intelligence ?

THOUGHT Systems that thinkSystems that think

like humans rationally

Systems that act Systems that act

BEHAVIOUR like humans rationally

HUMAN RATIONAL
 Systems that think like humans:
cognitive modeling
• Humans as observed from ‘inside’
• How do we know how humans think?
• Introspection vs. psychological experiments
• Cognitive Science
• “The exciting new effort to make computers think …
machines with minds in the full and literal sense”
(Haugeland)
• “[The automation of] activities that we associate with
human thinking, activities such as decision-making,
problem solving, learning …” (Bellman)
What is Artificial Intelligence ?

THOUGHT Systems that thinkSystems that think

like humans rationally

Systems that act Systems that act

BEHAVIOUR like humans rationally

HUMAN RATIONAL
Systems that think ‘rationally’
"laws of thought"
• Humans are not always ‘rational’
• Rational - defined in terms of logic?
• Logic can’t express everything (e.g. uncertainty)
• Logical approach is often not feasible in terms of
computation time (needs ‘guidance’)
• “The study of mental facilities through the use of
computational models” (Charniak and McDermott)
• “The study of the computations that make it
possible to perceive, reason, and act” (Winston)
What is Artificial Intelligence ?

THOUGHT Systems that thinkSystems that think

like humans rationally

Systems that act Systems that act

BEHAVIOUR like humans rationally

HUMAN RATIONAL
 Systems that act rationally:
“Rational agent”
• Rational behavior: doing the right thing
• The right thing: that which is expected to maximize
goal achievement, given the available information
• Giving answers to questions is ‘acting’.
• I don't care whether a system:
• replicates human thought processes
• makes the same decisions as humans
• uses purely logical reasoning
Systems that act rationally
• Logic  only part of a rational agent, not all of
rationality
• Sometimes logic cannot reason a correct conclusion
• At that time, some specific (in domain) human
knowledge or information is used
• Thus, it covers more generally different situations of
problems
• Compensate the incorrectly reasoned conclusion
Systems that act rationally
• Study AI as rational agent –
2 advantages:
• It is more general than using logic only
• Because: LOGIC + Domain knowledge
• It allows extension of the approach with more scientific
methodologies
Rational agents
An agent is an entity that perceives and acts

This course is about designing rational agents

Abstractly, an agent is a function from percept histories to

actions:
[f: P*  A]
For any given class of environments and tasks, we seek the
agent (or class of agents) with the best performance
Caveat: computational limitations make perfect rationality
unachievable
 design best program for given machine resources
•


• Artificial
• Produced by human art or effort, rather than
originating naturally.
• Intelligence
• is the ability to acquire knowledge and use it"
• So AI was defined as:
• AI is the study of ideas that enable computers to be
intelligent.
• AI is the part of computer science concerned with
design of computer systems that exhibit human
intelligence(From the Concise Oxford Dictionary)
From the above two definitions, we can see that AI has
two major roles:
• Study the intelligent part concerned with
humans.
• Represent those actions using computers.
 Abridged 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 breakthroughs
Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov
in 1997

During the 1991 Gulf War, US forces deployed an AI logistics planning

and scheduling program that involved up to 50,000 vehicles, cargo, and
people

NASA's on-board autonomous planning program controlled the

scheduling of operations for a spacecraft

Proverb solves crossword puzzles better than most humans

Humanoids like Sophia, Ameca etc. are designed and implemented

 AI Winter

 AI research has endured a bumpy journey

and survived two major droughts of funding,
known as “AI winters”, which occurred in
1974 – 1980 and 1987 – 1993
 What happened during AI winter?

 It referred to hype generated by over

promises from developers, unrealistically high
expectations from end users, and extensive
media promotion.
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Chapter 2 : Agents

 Agents and environments

 Rationality

 PEAS (Performance measure,

Environment, Actuators, Sensors)
 Environment types

 Agent types

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 Agents
 An agent is anything that can be viewed as
perceiving its environment through sensors and
acting upon that environment through actuators
 Human agent: eyes, ears, and other organs for
sensors; hands,
 legs, mouth, and other body parts for actuators
 Robotic agent: cameras and infrared range finders
for sensors;
 various motors for actuators
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 Agents and environments

 The agent function maps from percept histories to

actions:
[f: P*  A]
 The agent program runs on the physical
architecture to produce f
 agent = architecture + program
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Vacuum-cleaner world

 Percepts: location and contents, e.g.,

[A,Dirty]
 Actions: Left, Right, Suck, NoOp

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Rational agents
 An agent should strive to "do the right thing",
based on what it can perceive and the actions
it can perform. The right action is the one that
will cause the agent to be most successful
 Performance measure: An objective criterion
for success of an agent's behavior
 E.g., performance measure of a vacuum-
cleaner agent could be amount of dirt cleaned
up, amount of time taken, amount of electricity
consumed, amount of noise generated, etc.
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Rational agents

 Rational Agent: For each possible

percept sequence, a rational agent
should select an action that is
expected to maximize its performance
measure, given the evidence provided
by the percept sequence and
whatever built-in knowledge the agent
has.

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What’s involved in Intelligence?
Intelligent agents
 Ability to interact with the real world
 to perceive, understand, and act
 e.g., speech recognition and understanding and synthesis
 e.g., image understanding
 e.g., ability to take actions, have an effect

 Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Planning

 modeling the external world, given input
 solving new problems, planning and making decisions
 ability to deal with unexpected problems, uncertainties

 Learning and Adaptation

 we are continuously learning and adapting
 our internal models are always being “updated”
• e.g. a baby learning to categorize and recognize animals

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Implementing agents
 Table look-ups
 Autonomy
 All actions are completely specified
 no need in sensing, no autonomy
 example: Monkey and the banana
 Structure of an agent
 agent = architecture + program
 Agent types
• medical diagnosis
• Satellite image analysis system
• part-picking robot
• Interactive English tutor
• cooking agent
• taxi driver

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Agent types
 Example: Taxi driver
 Simple reflex
 If car-in-front-is-breaking then initiate-breaking
 Agents that keep track of the world
 If car-in-front-is-breaking and on fwy then initiate-breaking
 needs internal state
 goal-based
 If car-in-front-is-breaking and needs to get to hospital then go to
adjacent lane and plan
 search and planning
 utility-based
 If car-in-front-is-breaking and on fwy and needs to get to hospital
alive then search of a way to get to the hospital that will make your
passengers happy.
 Needs utility function that map a state to a real function (am I
happy?)

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Summary
 What is Artificial Intelligence?
 modeling humans thinking, acting, should think,
should act.
 History of AI
 Intelligent agents
 We want to build agents that act rationally

 Real-World Applications of AI
 AI is alive and well in various “every day” applications
• many products, systems, have AI components
 Assigned Reading
 Chapters 1 and 2 in the text R&N

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