Week 1

INTRODUCING AI
WEEK 1: INTRODUCING AI

OBJECTIVES:
WEEK 1: INTRODUCING AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had several false

starts and stops over the years, partly because
people don’t really understand what AI is all about,
or even what it should accomplish.
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Defining the Term AI

Saying that AI is an artificial intelligence doesn’t really tell you anything

meaningful, which is why there are so many discussions and disagreements
over this term. Yes, you can argue that what occurs is artificial, not having
come from a natural source.
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Discerning intelligence

People define intelligence in many different ways. However, you can say that
intelligence involves certain mental activities composed of the following
activities:

» Learning: Having the ability to obtain and process new information.

» Reasoning: Being able to manipulate information in various ways.

» Understanding: Considering the result of information manipulation.

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» Grasping truths: Determining the validity of the manipulated information.

» Seeing relationships: Divining how validated data interacts with other data.

» Considering meanings: Applying truths to particular situations in a manner

consistent with their relationship.

» Separating fact from belief: Determining whether the data is adequately

supported by provable sources that can be demonstrated to be consistently
valid.
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The list could easily get quite long, but even this list is relatively prone to
interpretation by anyone who accepts it as viable. As you can see from the
list, however, intelligence often follows a process that a computer system can
mimic as part of a simulation:

1.Set a goal based on needs or wants.

2.Assess the value of any currently known information in support of the goal.

3.Gather additional information that could support the goal.

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4.Manipulate the data such that it achieves a form consistent with existing
information.

5.Define the relationships and truth values between existing and new information.

6.Determine whether the goal is achieved.

7.Modify the goal in light of the new data and its effect on the probability of success.

8.Repeat Steps 2 through 7 as needed until the goal is achieved (found true) or the
possibilities for achieving it are exhausted (found false).
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Discovering four ways to define AI

As described in the previous section, the first concept that’s important to

understand is that AI doesn’t really have anything to do with human
intelligence. Yes, some AI is modeled to simulate human intelligence, but
that’s what it is: a simulation. When thinking about AI, notice an interplay
between goal seeking, data processing used to achieve that goal, and data
acquisition used to better understand the goal.
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AI relies on algorithms to achieve a result that may or may not have anything to do with
human goals or methods of achieving those goals. With this in mind, you can categorize
AI in four ways:

» Acting humanly: When a computer acts like a human, it best reflects the Turing test,
in which the computer succeeds when differentiation between the computer and a
human isn’t possible.

» Thinking humanly: When a computer thinks as a human, it performs tasks that

require intelligence (as contrasted with rote procedures) from a human to succeed, such
as driving a car.
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To determine whether a program thinks like a human, you must have some method of determining how
humans think, which the cognitive modeling approach defines. This model relies on three techniques:

•Introspection: Detecting and documenting the techniques used to achieve goals by monitoring one’s
own thought processes.

•Psychological testing: Observing a person’s behavior and adding it to a database of similar behaviors
from other persons given a similar set of circumstances, goals, resources, and environmental conditions
(among other things).

•Brain imaging: Monitoring brain activity directly through various mechani cal means, such as
Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT), Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (MRI), and Magnetoencephalography (MEG).
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» Thinking rationally: Studying how humans think using some standard enables the
creation of guidelines that describe typical human behaviors. A person is considered
rational when following these behaviors within certain levels of deviation.

» Acting rationally: Studying how humans act in given situations under specific
constraints enables you to determine which techniques are both efficient and effective. A
computer that acts rationally relies on the recorded actions to interact with an
environment based on conditions, environmental factors, and existing data.
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The four classification types promoted by Arend Hintze:

» Reactive machines: The machines you see beating humans at chess or

playing on game shows are examples of reactive machines. A reactive
machine has no memory or experience upon which to base a decision.

» Limited memory: A self-driving car or autonomous robot can’t afford

the time to make every decision from scratch.
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» Theory of mind: A machine that can assess both its required goals and
the potential goals of other entities in the same environment has a kind of
understanding that is feasible to some extent today, but not in any
commercial form.

» Self-awareness: This is the sort of AI that you see in movies. However, it

requires technologies that aren’t even remotely possible now because such
a machine would have a sense of both self and consciousness.
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Understanding the History of AI

The desire to create intelligent machines (or, in ancient times,

idols) is as old as humans. The desire not to be alone in the
universe, to have something with which to communicate without
the inconsistencies of other humans, is a strong one.
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Starting with symbolic logic at Dartmouth

The earliest computers were just that: computing devices. They

mimicked the human ability to manipulate symbols in order to
perform basic math tasks, such as addition. Logical reasoning later
added the capability to perform mathematical reasoning through
comparisons (such as determining whether one value is greater
than another value).
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Continuing with expert systems

Expert systems first appeared in the 1970s and again in the 1980s as an
attempt to reduce the computational requirements posed by AI using the
knowledge of experts. A number of expert system representations appeared,
including rule based (which use if. . .then statements to base decisions on
rules of thumb), frame based (which use databases organized into related
hierarchies of generic information called frames), and logic based (which rely
on set theory to establish relationships).
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Overcoming the AI winters

The term AI winter refers to a period of reduced funding in the

development of AI. In general, AI has followed a path on which
proponents overstate what is possible, inducing people with no
technology knowledge at all, but lots of money, to make
investments.
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Considering AI Uses

You find AI used in a great many applications today. The only

problem is that the technology works so well that you don’t know
that it even exists. In fact, you might be surprised to find that many
devices in your home already make use of AI.
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Here are just a few of the ways in which you might see AI used:

» Fraud detection: You get a call from your credit card company asking
whether you made a particular purchase. The credit card company isn’t
being nosy; it’s simply alerting you to the fact that someone else could be
making a purchase using your card.

» Resource scheduling: Many organizations need to schedule the use of

resources efficiently.
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» Complex analysis: Humans often need help with complex analysis because there are
literally too many factors to consider.

» Automation: Any form of automation can benefit from the addition of AI to handle
unexpected changes or events.

» Customer service: The customer service line you call today may not even have a
human behind it.

» Safety systems: Many of the safety systems found in machines of various sorts today
rely on AI to take over the vehicle in a time of crisis.
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Avoiding AI Hype

The problem is that AI is actually in its infancy and any sort of

application such as those shown in the movies is the creative
output of an overactive imagination.
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Here are the five tribes of learning:

» Symbolists: The origin of this tribe is in logic and philosophy. This group relies on inverse deduction to solve
problems.

» Connectionists: This tribe’s origin is in neuroscience and the group relies on backpropagation to solve
problems.

» Evolutionaries: The evolutionaries tribe originates in evolutionary biology, relying on genetic programming
to solve problems.

» Bayesians: This tribe’s origin is in statistics and relies on probabilistic inference to solve problems.

» Analogizers: The origin of this tribe is in psychology. The group relies on kernel machines to solve problems.
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Connecting AI to the Underlying Computer

To see AI at work, you need to have some sort of computing

system, an application that contains the required software, and a
knowledge base. The computing system could be anything with a
chip inside; in fact, a smartphone does just as well as a desktop
computer for some applications.