CS1AC16 INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

What is intelligence? - if we want to create artificial intelligence, we should know what a natural
intelligence is.
Dictionary definition – capacity to acquire and apply knowledge
It's hard to define precisely what intelligence is because it has different meanings for different people
but in general it's associated with being adaptive – you do things because there's a good reason and
when the circumstances change, your behavior must change too.

“Behavior is usually considered intelligent when it can be seen to be adaptive. An animal is

considered intelligent when we can see how its behavior fulfils its present or future needs. A
squirrel that hides nuts in apparent anticipation of winter is thought of as more intelligent than
a lemming that throws itself off a cliff. But when we learn that that the squirrel will continue to
collect nuts even when it has hidden infinitely more than it can possibly eat over winter, we
begin to question its intelligence. Eventually we hear that it does not even remember where it
has hidden its winter supply, and the case for squirrel intelligence is settled”
[Balkenius (1994)]
Balkenius differentiates between intelligent and instinctive behavior. Some animals display behavior
that appears intelligent but is in fact only based on instinct.
Sand wasp example – the scientists removes food left outside the nest by the wasp but the wasp
still keeps leaving it there.

There are 2 approaches to artificial intelligence:

 Weak AI – computers will never be as intelligent as humans but they can display some thought-
like behaviors
 Strong AI – computers can be made equal or better than humans

In general, the more restricted the field is, the easier it is to produce a machine that can be considered
intelligent – see expert systems.

Artificial life – producing computer entities that have lifelike behaviors.

Machine intelligence is a broad field. It includes:

 Perception
 Machine vision
 Speech recognition
 Complex or simple sensors
 Mobile robotics
 Reasoning and planning
 Expert systems
 Machine learning
Each different area is complex in its own right.

History of machine intelligence

 1st paradigm – sub-symbolic processing – focused on trying to understand the brain using
computational methods and build machines to simulate brain
 o 1943 - Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts developed a model of artificial neuron. They
suggested that any computable function could be computed by some network of
neurons and argued that a structured network of neurons could learn.
o 1949 – Donald Hebb built on McCulloch and Pitts work by suggesting that the strength
of a synapse connecting 2 neurons changes depending on how active the neurons are –
Hebbian learning
o 1951 – Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds built the first neural network called SNARC
(Stochastic Neural-Analog Reinforcement Computer)
o 1958 – Frank Rosenblatt created another neural network model – Perceptron. The
machine was based on Hebb rule and could learn to distinguish simple visual stimuli
o 1968 – Igor Alexander built the first hardware n-tuple network
 2nd paradigm – symbolic processing
o 1958 – John McCarthy wrote a program called Advice Taker that used domain
knowledge and simple rules to search for solutions to problems
o 1961 - Allen Newell and Herbert Simon built the General Problem Solver that was
designed to imitate human problem solving protocols
o 1965 - Weizenbaum created ELIZA – a program that imitated conversations by
manipulating the sentences given by human
o 1969 - Buchanan created Dendral – the first expert system. It operated in a very small
domain
o 1976 - Buchanan and Shortliffe created Mycin – and expert system to diagnose blood
infections
 rd
3 paradigm – modern connectionism
o 1982 - Kohonen developed Self Organizing Maps
o 1986 - Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams developed Back Propagation – a learning
method for multi-layer networks