ARTIFICIAL

INTELLIGENCE [AI]

LECTURE ONE
INTRODUCTION

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 Lecture Learning Objectives
• At the end of this Lesson, we should grasp the:
• Theoretical and applied definitions of AI
• Goals of AI
• Foundations of AI
• History and periods of AI
• Trends/fashions of AI
• Advantages & disadvantages of AI

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 ?What is Artificial Intelligence
Theoretical Perspective…
•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?

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 What is Artificial Intelligence?
Cont’d
• 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 computer science that we don't yet
know how to do properly (!)?
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 What is Artificial Intelligence?
Cont’d

THOUGHT Systems that think Systems that think

like humans rationally

BEHAVIOUR Systems that act Systems that act

like humans rationally

HUMAN RATIONAL

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 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)

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 Systems That Act Like Humans
…Cont’d

?
• 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.
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 Systems That Act Like Humans
…Cont’d
• 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
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 Systems That Act Like Humans
…Cont’d

The Total Turing Test

•Includes two more issues:

–Computer vision
• to perceive objects (seeing)

–Robotics
• to move objects (acting)
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 ?What is Artificial Intelligence

THOUGHT Systems that think Systems that think

like humans rationally

BEHAVIOUR Systems that act Systems that act

like humans rationally

HUMAN RATIONAL

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 Systems That Think Like Humans:
Cognitive Modeling
• Based on Cognitive/Thinking 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)
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 ? What is Artificial Intelligence

THOUGHT Systems that think Systems that think

like humans rationally

Systems that act Systems that act

BEHAVIOUR
like humans rationally

HUMAN RATIONAL

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 Systems That Think ‘Rationally’:
" "Laws Of Thought
• “The study of mental facilities through the use of
computational models” (Charniak & McDermott)
• “The study of the computations that make it
possible to perceive, reason, and act” (Winston)
• However, 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’)
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 ? What is Artificial Intelligence

THOUGHT
Systems that think Systems that think
like humans rationally

Systems that act Systems that act

BEHAVIOUR
like humans rationally

HUMAN RATIONAL

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 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’, hence
it doesn’t matter whether a system:
– Replicates human thought processes
– Makes the same decisions as humans
– Uses purely logical reasoning
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 Systems That Act Rationally:
… “Rational Agent” Cont’d
• Artificial: Produced by human art or effort, rather
than originating naturally.
• Intelligence: Is the ability to acquire knowledge and use
it" [Pigford and Baur]

• So AI was defined as:

• The study of ideas that enable computers to be
intelligent.
• The part of computer science concerned with design
of computer systems that exhibit human intelligence
16 (Concise Oxford Dictionary)
 Systems That Act Rationally:
… “Rational Agent” Cont’d
• 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.

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 Goals of AI
• AI has two main goals:
• To make computers more useful by letting them
take over dangerous or tedious tasks from human
• Understand principles of human intelligence
• Major AI goal: To create technology that allows
computers and machines to function intelligently.

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 The Foundations of AI
1. 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

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 …The Foundation of AI Cont’d
2. Mathematics
•Formalizes the three main areas of AI:
Computation, Probability, & Logic
• Computation leads to analysis of the problems
that can be computed i.e., complexity theory
• Probability contributes the “degree of belief” to
handle uncertainty in AI
• Decision (logic) theory combines probability
theory and utility theory (bias)
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 …The Foundation of AI Cont’d
3. Psychology
• Study of 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

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 The Foundation of AI
4. 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.
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 …The Foundation of AI Cont’d
5. 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 such as language, vision, planning,
23 etc.
 …The Foundation of AI Cont’d
6. Linguistics
• For understanding natural languages
• Different approaches have been adopted from
the linguistic work
• Formal languages
• Syntactic and semantic analysis
• Knowledge representation

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 The Main Topics/Areas In AI
• Artificial intelligence can be considered under a number
of headings:
• Search (includes Game Playing).
• Representing Knowledge and Reasoning with it.
• Planning.
• Learning.
• Natural language processing.
• Expert Systems.
• Interacting with the Environment
(e.g. Vision, Speech recognition, Robotics)
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 History & Periods of AI
• AI has a long history, as old as electronic computers
themselves (1940), originating in Ancient Greece
(Aristotle)
• Historical Figures Contributed include:
• Ramon Lull
• Al Khowarazmi
• Leonardo da Vinci
• David Hume
• George Boole
• Charles Babbage
• John von Neuman
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 The ‘von Neuman’ Architecture

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 …History & Periods of AI Cont’d
• Origins
– The Dartmouth conference: 1956
• John McCarthy (Stanford)
• Marvin Minsky (MIT)
• Herbert Simon (CMU)
• Allen Newell (CMU)
• Arthur Samuel (IBM)
• The Turing Test (1950)
• “Machines who Think”
– By Pamela McCorckindale
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 …History & Periods of AI Cont’d
• Early period - 1950’s & 60’s
• Game playing
• brute force (calculate your way out)
• Theorem proving
• symbol manipulation
• Biological models
• neural nets
• Symbolic application period - 70’s
• Early expert systems, use of knowledge
• Commercial period - 80’s
• boom in knowledge/ rule bases
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 …History & Periods of AI Cont’d
• Period - 90’s and New Millennium
• Real-world applications, modelling, better evidence,
use of theories, etc.
• Topics: data mining, formal models, GA’s, fuzzy logic,
agents, neural networks, autonomous systems
• Applications
• Visual recognition of traffic
• Medical diagnosis
• Directory enquiries
• Power plant control
30 • Automatic aeroplanes, trains and vehicles
 Trends/Fashions in AI
• Progress goes in stages, following funding booms: Some
examples:
1. Machine Translation of Languages
– 1950’s to 1966 - Syntactic translators
– 1966 - all US funding cancelled
– 1980 - commercial translators available
2. Neural Networks
– 1943 - first AI work by McCulloch & Pitts
– 1950’s & 60’s - Minsky’s book on “Perceptrons” stops nearly
all work on nets
– 1986 - rediscovery of solutions leads to massive growth in
31 neural nets research
 Advantages of AI
• Major advantages include:
• 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

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 Disadvantages of AI
• Major disadvantages include:
• Increased costs
• Difficulty with software development - slow
and expensive
• Few experienced programmers
• Few practical products have reached the market
as yet.

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 Lecture Summary
• The Lesson has explained about:
• Theoretical and applied definitions of AI
• Goals of AI
• Foundations of AI
• Advantages & disadvantages of AI
• History and periods of AI
• Trends/fashions of AI
QUESTION: What are the major areas and
applications of AI do you know?
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 …END

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING

NEXT:
LECTURE TWO
[AREAS & APPLICATION OF AI]

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