MODULE – LECTURE NOTES ISP542/ITS462 OVERVIEW OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

CHAPTER 1
OVERVIEW OF ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE

INTRODUCTION _____________________________________ 1
WHAT IS AI? _______________________________________ 1
THE TURING TEST __________________________________ 3
AGENT APPROACH _________________________________ 4
HISTORY OF AI _____________________________________ 6
AI APPLICATIONS ___________________________________ 6

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1 INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS AI?
AI is a branch of computer science which concern the study and creation of computer
system that exhibit some form of intelligence. It is a system that:
• Can learn new concepts and tasks
• Can reason and draw useful conclusions about world around us
• Can understand a natural language
• Can perceive and comprehend a visual scene
• Perform other types of task that require human types of intelligence

Definitions of AI are organized in four categories as shown in Figure 1.1.

Humanly
Thinking Systems that think like humans
“[The automation of] activities that
we associate with human thinking,
activities such as decision making,
problem solving, learning…”
(Bellman, 1978)
Thinking humanly — cognitive
modeling. Systems should solve
problems the same way humans
do.
Acting Systems that act like humans
“The study of how to make
computers do things at which, at
the moment, people are better.”
(Rich and Knight, 1991)
Acting humanly — the Turing Test
approach.
Figure 1.1: Definition of AI
Rationally
Systems that think rationally
“The study of mental faculties through
the use of computational models.”
(Charniak and McDermott, 1985)
Thinking rationally — the use of logic.
Need to worry about modeling
uncertainty and dealing with
complexity.
Systems that act like rationally
“AI… is concerned with intelligent
behavior in artifacts.” (Nilsson, 1998)
Acting rationally — the study of rational
agents: agents that maximize the
expected value of their performance
measure given what they currently
know.

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Thinking humanly
If we are going to say that a given program thinks like a human, we must have
some way of determining how humans think. We need to get inside the actual workings
of human minds. There are two ways to do this: i) Introspection: trying to catch our own
thoughts as they go by, ii) psychological experiments: a study of the mind and how it
influences behavior.

Once we have a sufficiently precise theory of the mind, it becomes possible to

express the theory as a computer program. If the program’s input/output and timing
behaviors match corresponding human behaviors, that is evidence that some of the
program’s mechanisms could also be operating in humans.

Acting humanly
The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing (1950), was designed to provide a
satisfactory operational definition of intelligence. Rather than proposing a long and
perhaps controversial list of qualifications required for intelligence, he suggested a test
based on indistinguishability from undeniably intelligent entities – human beings. The
computer passes the test if a human interrogator, after posing some written questions,
cannot tell whether a computer come from a person or not. The computer would need to
posses the following capabilities:

• Natural language processing to enable it to communicate successfully in English.

• Knowledge representation to store what it knows or hears.
• Automated reasoning to use the stored information to answers questions and to
draw new conclusions.
• Machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate
patterns.

Turing test deliberately avoided direct physical interaction between the

interrogator and the computer because physical simulation of a person is unnecessary
for intelligence.

Thinking rationally

If we are going to say that a given machine can think rationally, we need to
understand how the machine should think and use logic to capture the laws of rationally
thought as symbols. Reasoning involves shifting symbols according to well-defined
rules and will result to idealized reasoning. But there are two main obstacles to this
approach:

• Not easy to take informal knowledge and state it in formal terms required by logical
notation.
• Big difference between able to solve problem “in principle” and doing so in practice.

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Acting rationally
An agent is just something that acts. But computer agents are expected to have
other attributes that distinguish them from more “programs”, such as operating under
autonomous control, perceiving their environment, persisting over a prolonged time
period, adapting to change and being capable of taking on another’s goals. A rational
agent is one that acts so as to achieve the best outcome or, when there is uncertainty,
the best expected outcome.

THE TURING TEST

One of the earliest and most significant papers on machine intelligence,
‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, was written by the British mathematician Alan
Turing (Turing, 1950). He suggested that instead of asking whether machines can think,
we should ask whether machines can pass a behavioral intelligence test, which has
come to be called the Turing Test.

The test, which Turing called the imitation game, place the machine and a human
counterpart in rooms apart from a second human being, referred to as the interrogator.
The interrogator is not able to see or speak directly to either of them, does not know
which entity is actually the machine, and may communicate with them solely by use of a
textual device such as terminal. The interrogator is asked to distinguish the computer
from the human being solely on the basis of their answers to questions asked over this
device. If the interrogator cannot distinguish the machine from the human, then Turing
argues, the machine may be assumed to be intelligent.

By isolating the interrogator from both the machine and the other human
participant, the test ensures that the interrogator will not be biased by the appearance of
the machine or any mechanical property of its voice. The interrogator is free to ask
questions in an effort to uncover the computer’s identity. For example, the interrogator
may ask both subjects to perform a rather involved arithmetic calculation, assuming that
the computer will be more likely to get it correct than the human. To counter this
strategy, the computer will need to know when it should fail to get a correct answer to
such problems in order to seem like a human. To discover the human’s identity on the
basis of emotional nature, the interrogator may ask both subjects to respond to a poem
or work of art. This strategy will require that the computer have knowledge concerning
the emotional makeup of human beings.

The important features of Turing’s test are:

• Attempts to give an understanding or idea or belief of intelligence.
• Prevents from being sidetracked by such confusing and currently unanswerable
questions as whether the computer uses the appropriate internal processes or
whether or not the machine is actually conscious if its actions.
• Eliminates any bias by forcing the interrogator to focus solely on the content of the
answers to questions.

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AGENT APPROACH
An agent is a computer system situated in some environment and that is capable
of autonomous action in the environment in order to meet its design objectives.
Autonomy is a difficult concept to pin down precisely, but we mean it simply in the sense
that the system should be able to act without the direct intervention of humans (or other
agents), and should have control over its own actions and internal state.

An intelligent agent is a computer system that is capable of flexible autonomous

action in order to meet its design objectives. By flexible, the system must be:
• Responsive: agents should perceive their environment (which may be the physical
world, a user, a collection of agents, the internet, etc) and respond in a timely
fashion to changes that occur in it.
• Proactive: agents should not simply act in response to their environment; they
should be able to exhibit opportunistic, goal-directed behavior and take the initiative
where appropriate.
• Social: agents should be able to interact, when they deem appropriate, with other
artificial agents and humans in order to complete their own problem solving and to
help others with their activities.

For any new technology to be considered as useful in the computer marketplace,

intelligent agent must offer one of two things:
• The ability to solve problems that hitherto (up to now) been beyond the scope of
automation – either because no existing technology could be used to solve the
problem, or because it was considered too expensive (difficult, time-consuming,
risky) to develop solutions using existing technology; or
• The ability to solve problems that can already be solved in a significantly better
(cheaper, more natural, easier, more efficient, or faster) way.

Although intelligent agent technology has an important role to play in the

development of

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leading-edge computing applications, it should not be oversold. In some cases, the very
nature of agent paradigm leads to a number of problems.
• No overall system controller. An agent-based solution may not be appropriate for
domains in which global constraints have to be maintained or in domains where real-
time response must be guaranteed.
• No global perspective. An agent’s actions are, by definition, determined by that
agent’s local state. However, since in almost any realistic agent system, globally
global knowledge is not a possibility, this may mean that agents make globally sub-
optimal decisions.
• Trust and delegation. Users have to gain confidence on the agents that work on their
behalf, and this process can take time.

Agent application domains:

• Industrial applications.
o Process control. Ex. ARCHON – has been applied in several process control
applications, including electricity transportation management and particle
accelerator control.
o Manufacturing. Ex. YAMS – applies the well-known Contract Net protocol to
manufacturing control.
o Air traffic control. Ex. OASIS – represent both aircraft and the various air traffic
control systems in operation.

• Commercial applications:
o Information management. Ex. Maxims – electronic filtering agent that learns to
prioritize, delete, forward, sort and archive mail message on behalf of user.
o Electronic commerce. Ex. Kasbah – realizes the marketplace by creating
“buying” and “selling” agents for each good to be purchased or sold respectively.
Commercial transactions take place by the interactions of these agents.
o Business process management. Ex. ADEPT – viewing a business process as a
community of negotiating, service-providing agents.

• Medical applications:
o Patient monitoring. Ex. The Guardian – intended to help manage patient care in
Surgical Intensive Care Unit.
o Health care. Ex. Prototypical agent-based distributed medical care system – to
integrate the patient management process, which typically involves many
individuals.

• Entertainment:
o Games. Ex. Teal Time Able – agents are programmed in terms of behavior.
o Interactive theater and cinema. Ex. Believable agent – play part of humans in
theater-style applications.
o

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HISTORY OF AI
Year Description
1943 McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain
1950 Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
1950s Early AI programs, including Samuel’s checkers program, Newell & Simon’s
Logic Theorist, Gelernter’s Geometry Engine
1656 Dartmouth meeting: “Artificial Intelligence” adopted
1965 Robinson’s complete algorithm for logical reasoning
1966-74 AI discovers computational complexity; Neural network research almost
disappears
1969-79 Early development of knowledge-based systems
1980-88 Expert systems industry booms
1988-93 Expert systems industry busts: “AI Winter”
1985-95 Neural networks return to popularity
1988 Resurgence of probability: general increase in technical depth “Nouvelle AI”:
A Life, GAs, soft computing
1995 Agents, agents, agents…everywhere
2003 Human-level AI back on the agenda

AI APPLICATIONS
• Game playing
o IBM’s Deep Blue - First AI to beat a human chess champion: Garry Kasparov,
1997
o Blondie24 - Machine learning program that won a checker’s tournament
o Commercial game AI - Increase in more sophisticated AI work for “non-academic”
games
o Chess, Go, Risk, Bridge, Checkers

• Logistics Planning
o Trip itineraries - Engines such as MapQuest use AI to propose driving directions
from one location to another
o Dynamic Analysis and replanning Tool (DART) - Used during the 1991 Persian
Gulf crisis to assist in managing military resources (over 50,000 people, vehicles
and cargo shipments)
o Airline flight scheduling - If flights are delayed or re-routed, AI planners are used to
figure the best way to re-schedule departures and arrivals

⚫ Speech recognition
o Airline reservation systems - Often robust to many different voice pitches and
accents

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o Automatic transcription - Monitor language and content for live radio and television.
Assist in the transcribing of closed-captioned television programs

⚫ Text processing
o Automated language translation - Altavista’s Babel fish server
o Information retrieval - Google search engine
o Text classification and organization - Google news, SPAM filtering
o Document summarization - Columbia University’s News blaster
o Systems that read handwritten addresses to speed mail sorting

⚫ Biology & Medicine

o Diagnosis systems - Specialists often use statistical AI tolls to diagnose a patient
has a disease based in his/her symptoms
o Genome analysis software - Now that the human and other genomes are
complete. AI is used to identify new genes, infer biochemical pathways, and
compare genomes of multiple species

⚫ Vision
o Handwriting recognition - US Postal Service automatically sorts mail
o Face recognition - Government/bank security systems
o Autonomous Land Vehicle in a Neural Network (ALVINN) - Uses camera data to
automatically steer a car on a highway at speeds up to 65 mph (from Washington,
DC to San Diego and back)

• Search Engines
• Theorem Proving
• Cars (stability traction,
braking assist, driving,
...)
• Aircraft auto landers
• Information Retrieval
Systems
• Story writers, poetry
writers, ...
• Music Composition
• Annoying auto-correct
agents in word
processors
Today AI is in…
• Crisis management • Scheduling Systems
• Space Exploration • Assisted Living Support
• Finance • Dispensing Legal
• Retailing Advice
• Manufacturing • Essay Evaluation
• Inventory Control • Cryptanalysis
• Pharmaceutical • Translation
Research • Military Planning
• Genetic Research • Surveillance
• (Micro)Surgery • Traffic Control
• Insurance Underwriting • Detection of
• Environmental Steganography
Monitoring
• Protein Structure
Determination

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AI Tree

Machine Learning
Speech Understanding
Automatic
Programming
Robotic

Natural LanguageProcessing Game Playing

Neural Network
Expert System
Fuzzy Logic
Intelligent Tutor Genetic Algorithm

Computer Vision AI Data Mining

Tree

❑Philosophy Linguistics
Computer Science
❑Mathematics Psychology Management &
❑Economics Management Science
❑Neuroscience Philosophy
❑Psychology Electrical Engineering
❑Computer engineering
❑Control theory and Cybernetics
❑Linguistics

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