06/26/2023

1 Course textbook:

Textbook
Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig.
Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach.
2nd edition, Prentice Hall, 2002

Other books

Other widely used AI textbooks:

Dean, Allen, Aloimonos: Artificial Intelligence.
P. Winston: Artificial Intelligence, 3rd ed.
N. Nillson: Principles of AI.

Brachman, Levesque.
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.
Morgan Kaufman, 2004
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Knowledge representation

Artificial Intelligence
• The field of Artificial intelligence:
– The design and study of computer systems that behave
intelligently
• AI programs:
– Go beyond numerical computations and manipulations
– Focus on problems that require reasoning (intelligence)
– and often a great deal of knowledge about the world
• Success in solving the problems depends naturally on our
ability to:
– Represent the knowledge about the world
– Reason with the knowledge to obtain meaningful
answers
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Knowledge representation
3
• Knowledge representation (KR) is the study of
– how knowledge and facts about the world can be
represented, and
– what kinds of reasoning can be done with that
knowledge.

• Important KR questions one has to consider:

– representational adequacy,
– representational quality,
– computational cost of related inferences,
– representation of default, commonsense, or uncertain
information.

Knowledge representation: goals

We want a representation that is:

• rich enough to express the knowledge needed to solve the

problem
• as close to the problem as possible: compact, natural and
maintainable, amenable to efficient computation
• able to express features of the problem we can exploit for
computational gain
• able to trade off accuracy and computation time
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Knowledge-based agent
4 Knowledge base
Inference engine

• Knowledge base (KB):

– A set of sentences that describe the world and its behavior
in some formal (representational) language
– Typically domain specific but large knowledge corpuses
are built to provide general knowledge resources (Cyc-an
AI Project)
• Inference engine:
– A set of procedures that use the representational language
to infer new facts from known ones or answer a variety of
KB queries. Inferences typically require search.
– Typically domain independent

Example: MYCIN
• MYCIN: an expert system for diagnosis of bacterial infections
• Knowledge base represents
– Facts about a specific patient case
– Rules describing relations between entities in the bacterial
infection domain
If 1. The stain of the organism is gram-positive, and
2. The morphology of the organism is coccus, and
3. The growth conformation of the organism is chains
Then the identity of the organism is streptococcus

• Inference engine:
– manipulates the facts and known relations to answer
diagnostic queries (consistent with findings and rules)
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Knowledge representation languages

5 • Goal: express the knowledge about the world in a computer-
tractable form

• Key aspects of knowledge representation languages:

– Syntax: describes how sentences are formed in the
language
– Semantics: describes the meaning of sentences, what is it
the sentence refers to in the real world
– Computational aspect: describes how sentences and
objects are manipulated in concordance with semantical
conventions
Many KB systems rely on some variant of logic

Tentative topics

• Introduction
• AI programming languages - LISP
• Propositional logic and inference
• First order logic and inference
• Extensions of PL and FOL:
– Semantic networks, Frame-based representations
– Inheritance and Defaults
– Ontologies/Semantic Web
– Modeling time
• Planning and acting:
– Situational calculus
– STRIPS
…
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Tentative topics
6 • Modeling Uncertainty
– Extensional models
– Probabilistic models
– Bayesian belief networks
– Markov processes
• Decision-making in the presence of uncertainty
– Decision trees
– Markov decision processes

AI programming languages
Focus on symbolic processing
Special AI Languages:
– LISP (since 1956)
• Symbolics machines – in 80s, special LISP processors –
LISP functions hardwired
– Prolog
– Smalltalk
– Python
• Nowadays:
–C
– Java
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Logic
7 • Many knowledge representation systems rely on some variant
of logic, e.g.:
– Propositional logic
– First order logic
– Temporal logic
• And variety of extensions

Logic defines:
– Syntax: describes how sentences are formed in the
language
– Semantics: describes the meaning of sentences, what is it
the sentence refers to in the real world

Propositional logic
• Simplest type of logic

• A proposition is a statement that is either true or false

• Examples:
– Pitt is located in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh.
– It is raining today.
• More complex sentences:
– It is raining outside and the traffic in Oakland is heavy.

It is raining outside  the traffic in Oakland is

heavy
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First order logic

8 • More complex: objects, relations, properties are explicit

• Examples:
– Red(car12)
– Brother(Peter, John)

• More complex sentences:

x, y parent(x, y)  child ( y, x)

Knowledge representation
Many different ways of representing the same knowledge.
Representation may make inferences easier or more difficult.
Example:
• How to represent: “Car #12 is red.”
Solution 1: ?
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Knowledge representation
9 Many different ways of representing the same knowledge.
Representation may make inferences easier or more difficult.
Example:
• How to represent: “Car #12 is red.”
Solution 1: Red(car12).
– It’s easy to ask “What’s red?”
– But we can’t ask “what is the color of car12?”
Solution 2: ?

Knowledge representation
Many different ways of representing the same knowledge.
Representation may make inferences easier or more difficult.
Example:
• How to represent: “Car #12 is red.”
Solution 1: Red(car12).
– It’s easy to ask “What’s red?”
– But we can’t ask “what is the color of car12?”
Solution 2: Color (car12, red).
– It’s easy to ask “What’s red?”
– It’s easy to ask “What is the color of car12?”
– Can’t ask “What property of car12 has value red?”
Solution 3: ?
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Knowledge representation
10 Many different ways of representing the same knowledge.
Representation may make inferences easier or more difficult.
Example:
• How to represent: “Car #12 is red.”
Solution 1: Red(car12).
– It’s easy to ask “What’s red?”
– But we can’t ask “what is the color of car12?”
Solution 2: Color (car12, red).
– It’s easy to ask “What’s red?”
– It’s easy to ask “What is the color of car12?”
– Can’t ask “What property of car12 has value red?”
Solution 3: Prop(car12, color , red).
– It’s easy to ask all these questions.

Knowledge representation
• Prop(Object, Property, Value)
• Called: object-property-value representation

• If we merge many properties of the same object we get the

frame-based (object-centered) representation:

Prop(Object, Property1, Value1)

Prop(Object, Property2, Value2)
…
Prop(Object, Property-n, Value-
n)
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Knowledge representation
11 • Inheritance
• Properties are inherited from more general concepts
Example:
• Clyde is an Elephant & Elephant is Gray,

Gray

Elephant

Clyde

Knowledge representation
• Inheritance
• Properties are inherited from more general concepts
Example:
• Clyde is an Elephant & Elephant is Gray & Clyde is not grey

Gray Gray

Elephant Elephant

Clyde Clyde
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Ontology
12 If more than one person is building a knowledge base,
they must be able to share the conceptualization.

• A conceptualization is a mapping from the problem domain

into the representation.
• A conceptualization specifies:
– What types of objects are being modeled
– The vocabulary for specifying objects, relations and
properties
– The meaning or intention of the relations or
properties
• An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization.

Commonsense knowledge
• Our ability of answering questions intelligently relies heavily
on general knowledge about the world
• General knowledge about the world and relations that hold in
the world is referred to as commonsense knowledge
• Commonsense knowledge
– a very large corpus of knowledge
– helps us to understand things like:
• A pen can fit in the box
• A box can fit in the pen
• Challenge: representation of commonsense knowledge that
allows us to answer queries and make inferences
– Recent advances: Cyc project
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Cyc project
13 • Cyc is the world's largest and most complete general
knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine.
– 15000 relations
– 300000 concepts
– 3200000 assertions
– Temporal relations: 37

OpenCyc is the open source version of the Cyc

technology.
OpenCyc contains the full set of (non-proprietary) Cyc terms
as well as millions of assertions about the. Cycorp offers this
ontology at no cost and encourages you to make use of it as
you see fit.

Topics
• Planning and acting:
– Situational calculus
– STRIPS
• Modeling Uncertainty
– Extensional models
– Probabilistic models
– Bayesian belief networks
– Markov processes
• Decision-making in the presence of uncertainty
– Decision trees
– Markov decision processes