Muhammad Asif Lecture #1

Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098

AI & The Dream

“The Ultimate goal of AI research (which we are very far from achieving) is to build an
intelligent human being.” Science Fiction has also been exploring the ultimate goal of AI (or
highlighting the AI researchers dream), by producing novels, and movies, such as Star Wars,
Terminator, and Short Circuit, which exhibit intelligent machines. Such endeavors predict to
some extent the future of AI. This dream person can be hypothesized to have certain simple
modules, as shown in the following model:

INPUT INTERNALS OUTPUT

Knowledge Internal
Internal Base
Vision Robotics
Representation Representation
Reasoning

Deduction

Search

Planning
Internal Internal
Language Learning Speech
Representation Representation

The overall structure of the model is INPUT -> INTERNALS -> OUTPUT, where the INPUT
and the OUTPUT represent specialized areas of Artificial Intelligence which we will not be
addressing in this course. Our main focus will be on how this information is processed
internally, (i.e. INTERNALS) and how intelligent decisions are reached, which exhibit
Intelligence.

For this course we will keep the INPUT and OUTPUT modules simple by replacing them with
simple text based inputs and outputs, allowing easy transfer of knowledge from one side to
another. This would also relieve us from addressing difficult areas (Vision, Natural Language,
Robotics, and Speech processing/generation) which themselves require (as pre-requisites)
thorough knowledge of AI fundamental.

We can think of this approach as building a box (which includes all the internals) with primitive
form of inputs and outputs, and then later on adding more useful and productive inputs and
outputs, which resemble the real humans we are trying to mimic or clone:
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Muhammad Asif Lecture #1
Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098
... So the dream lives on ...

What AI can allow computers to do?

Elbow sw ivel
Shoulder
sw ivel

Yaw

Trunk
sw ivel
Pitch Roll

Robot Arm with Six Degrees of Freedom

Computers Can Help Planning

Planning systems: route planning, task planning, and of course Robotics:

Computers Can Help Experts Analyze, Diagnose and Design

Expert systems: MYCIN, PROSPECTOR, POEMS

Computers Can Solve Difficult Problems

Mathematical systems: ATLAS, PRESS, MACSYMA, Mathematica, Wolfram-Alpha

Computers Can Understand Simple English

Natural language systems: allowing friendly user interfaces.

Computers Can Understand Simple Images

Vision systems: medical image analysis, robots, security systems, satellite images

Computers Can Help Manufacture Products

Robotics: Assembly robots; are controlled and manipulated using AI techniques.

Computers Can Learn from Examples and Precedents

Learning systems: ID3, LEAP, ARM, POEMS
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Muhammad Asif Lecture #1
Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098

What is Artificial Intelligence?

1. The Handbook of AI, Barr and Feigenbaum;

AI is the part of computer science concerned with designing intelligent computer

systems, that is, systems that exhibit the characteristics we associate with intelligence
in human behavior - understanding language, learning, reasoning, solving problems,
and so on.

2. Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man, Boden;

Artificial Intelligence is not the study of computers, but of intelligence in thought and
action. Computers are its tools, because its theories are expressed as computer
programs that enable machines to do things that would require intelligence if done by
people.

3. Artificial Intelligence, An Introductory Course, Bundy (ed.);

What is AI? ... Artificial Intelligence is the attempt to build computational models of
cognitive processes, or, to put it another way: in Artificial Intelligence we make
computers perform tasks that would be considered intelligent if done by a human.

4. An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Charniak and McDermott;

Artificial Intelligence is the study of mental faculties through the use of

computational models... AI researchers are trying to create a computer, which thinks.

5. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Jackson, P. C.;

“Artificial Intelligence” is the ability of machines to do things that people would say
require intelligence. Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is an attempt to discover and
describe aspects of human intelligence that can be simulated by machine.

6. Principles of Artificial Intelligence, Nilsson;

Most of the work on building these kinds of systems [what are called artificial
intelligence systems] has taken place in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This
work has had largely an empirical and engineering orientation.

7. Conceptual Structures, Information Processing in Mind and Machine, Sowa;

Two fields devoted to knowledge-based systems are cognitive science and artificial
intelligence. Cognitive science is a merger of philosophy, linguistics, and philosophy
with a strong influence from computer science. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the
engineering counterpart; it pays more attention to programming tools and techniques
that to philosophical issues.

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Muhammad Asif Lecture #1
Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098

8. The Elements of Artificial Intelligence, Tanimoto;

Artificial intelligence is a field of study that encompasses computational techniques

for performing tasks that apparently require intelligence when performed by humans.
... AI: Art or Science? One difference between a science and an art is that a science
consists, in good part, of a body of proved principles that have been abstracted from
nature through the process of empirical inquiry and logical deduction. That physics is
a science is not contested. On the other hand, an art is for the most part a collection of
techniques, developed pragmatically to a sophisticated level, but not necessarily in a
logical way. Most cooks would agree that cooking is an art rather than a science.
Artificial intelligence is both an art and a science.

9. Artificial Intelligence, Winston;

There are many ways to define the field of Artificial Intelligence. here is one:
Artificial Intelligence is the study of ideas that enable computers to be intelligent.

10. Artificial Intelligence: Principles and Applications, Yazdani:

The most widely accepted definition of AI is that of Minsky (1968): “artificial

intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require
intelligence if done by men.”

11. Artificial Intelligence, Rich;

Artificial Intelligence is the study of how to make computers do things at which, at

the moment, people are better.

12. Artificial Intelligence - a personal view, David Marr;

Artificial Intelligence is the study of complex information processing problems that

have roots in some aspect of biological information processing. The goal of the
subject is to identify useful information processing problems, and give an abstract
account of how to solve them. Such an account is called a “method”, and it
corresponds to a theorem in mathematics.

13. Artificial Intelligence, Jim Howe;

Artificial Intelligence is an important new approach to the study of intelligent

behavior. It is distinguishable from Psychology and Philosophy, disciplines which
also investigate intelligence, through its use of advanced “information processing”
concepts, methods and techniques to model complex cognitive tasks which are
viewed as knowledge-based activities. It shares with Education a concern for
investigating ways in which knowledge is acquired and used.

14. A Personal View of Artificial Intelligence, Aaron Sloman;

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Muhammad Asif Lecture #1
Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098
... AI is a very general investigation of the nature of intelligence and the principles
and mechanisms required for understanding of replicating it.

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Muhammad Asif Lecture #1
Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098

AI & Expert Systems

• The Goal of AI scientists has always been to develop

computer programs that could in some sense THINK, i.e.
solve problems that would be considered intelligent if done
by a human.

•
•
•

• The major break through in developing intelligent programs

came through when the researchers discovered that the
problem solving power of a program comes from the
knowledge it possesses, NOT just from the formalisms and the
inference techniques.

•
•
•

• This realization led to the development of special-purpose

computer programs, systems that were expert in some narrow
problem area. These systems were named:

Expert Systems

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Muhammad Asif Lecture #2
Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098

Expert Systems
Advantages of Using Expert Systems

Expert Systems Human Experts

Permanent Perishable
Easy to transfer Difficult to transfer
Easy to document Difficult to document
Consistent Unpredictable
Affordable Expensive
Easy to duplicate Difficult to duplicate

Expert Systems (or the general term Knowledge Based Systems) can be
distinguished from other kinds of AI programs:

• Expert Systems deal with domains, which require considerable amount of

human expertise.
• Expert Systems exhibit high performance in terms of speed and reliability in
order to be useful tools.
• Expert Systems are capable of explaining and justifying their actions and
solutions.

Development of Expert Systems is Justified When:

• The task solution has a high payoff.

• Human expertise is being lost over time.
• Human expertise is scarce in the specific domain.
• Expertise is needed in many locations at one time.
• Expertise is needed in hostile environment.

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Muhammad Asif Lecture #2
Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098

Life Cycle of Expert Systems

Queries, Problems

Domain Knowledge Expert

Expert Engineer System
Strategies
rules
procedures
algorithms
Answers, Solutions

Knowledge Engineering: Transfer of knowledge from an Expert to

an Expert System

Toolbuilder Domain
Expert
Extends
Builds and tests
Interviews

Expert
System Knowledge Expert
Building Engineer System End-User
Tools Builds,
(Lisp, Shells) Uses
refines,
tests
Adds
Data

Clerical
Staff

The Players in the Expert Systems Game

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Muhammad Asif Lecture #2
Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098

An Overview of Expert Systems

Expert Systems have not been around for very long. The following list places
some of the best-known systems in context:

• Beginnings (1965 - 70): DENDRAL, MACSYMA

• Prototypes (1970 - 75): MYCIN, PROSPECTOR, HEARSAY
• Experimenting (1975 - 81): PUFF, GUIDON, INTERNIST
• Commercial Systems (1981 onwards): XCON, Drilling Advisor

DENDRAL’s job was to help interpret mass spectrometer data. Imagine you
have a mystery chemical; an electron beam can be used to smash the molecules,
which tend to break at certain characteristic places. The bits are charged, and
electric and magnetic fields can be used to steer the fragments to various
collection points, according to their weight and charge. The output of the
spectrometer is essentially a histogram of how much of what weight was found.
A complicating factor is that sundry of the bits tend to glue back together.
DENDRAL applies various kinds of chemical knowledge to the combinatorial
reasoning task of figuring out what the original chemical was.

MACSYMA is a set of tools for helping to manipulate collections of

mathematical equations. It is still very much in use, for example by nuclear
physicists who have large sets of simultaneous equations to solve.

MYCIN is the golden oldie of expert systems. It’s job was to figure out, from
simple and quickly obtainable data, what kinds of bacterial infection a newly-
admitted hospital patient might have and to recommend an appropriate set of
antibiotics that will cover all the possibilities, keeping him alive and in a stable
condition while the time-consuming lab tests were done. It only dealt with
bacterial infections, and only of certain kinds. It is worth remembering that
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Muhammad Asif Lecture #2
Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098
most of MYCIN’s knowledge was based on heuristics derived from consensus
of opinion at Stanford Medical School. So it is quite possible that MYCIN will
perform poorly if tested against experts from some other medical
establishments.

PROSPECTOR accepted data gathered by a field geologist, and advised about

whether it was worth doing more expensive explorations at that site. It had one
formal test, in which it performed well. It had knowledge of only fifteen kinds
of mineral deposit. Thus, it was only an encouraging prototype. However, a
typical PROSPECTOR session cost only about 10 dollars of computer time, and
took just a few minutes. This would save a field geologist from waiting a few
months for one of the few experts to look at his data. It is worth remembering
that the average field geologist finds nothing useful in his working lifetime.

HEARSAY-II demonstrated that a machine might be able to understand fairly

natural speech, on a highly constrained topic. It received input from a
microphone and understood it fairly reliably and quickly.

MYCIN, PROSPECTOR, and HEARSAY-II have radically different

architectures; each has spawned a number of derivatives. First, the techniques
of each were applied other areas to see if they still worked. Later, the specific
knowledge was hollowed out and replaced by a “general purpose” knowledge
representation mechanism, to produce what is called an expert system shell.
Although, there are many such shells now available, the representation
languages and facilities these hollowed out shells offer are not truly general -
each suits only a very limited range of applications, and can be pushed to
handle a few more (such as EMYCIN, EXPERT).

PUFF advises about the causes of obstructive airway disease. It was originally
implemented using EMYCIN, a shell developed from MYCIN. It was
eventually recreated in BASIC to run on an APPLE computer.
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Muhammad Asif Lecture #2
Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098
GUIDON was an attempt to use MYCIN’s knowledge base for teaching
MYCIN’s diagnostic skills. It was not a great success. MYCIN’s knowledge
was of a behaviourist kind, with the stimuli being particular patterns in the data
and the responses being the creation of new data. It didn’t have the kind of
causal knowledge needed to be able to explain why certain conclusions might
be expected to follow from certain data.

HASP processed data from sonar arrays on the sea-bed, to maintain a “current
best view” about what kinds of ships were in the vicinity and where they were
heading. It was developed for the US Navy, and worked well in the tests. It had
an architecture based on that of HEARSAY-II.

INTERNIST was intended to handle all of internal medicine (a huge domain),

and did cover nearly all of it. It mutated into CADUCEUS, another monster
system. Both have deficiencies but do work. They represent yet another flavor
of knowledge representation.

NEOMYCIN was a latter attempt to a MYCIN-like system, intended to cover a

wider range of subject matter and to reason in a manner much closer to that
actually employed by doctors - gathering some patient data, forming some
hypothesis, and then seeking to differentiate between those hypotheses by
asking and collecting relevant data.

XCON was used by Digital Equipment Corporation to process customers’

orders for VAX computers. Each order specifies a collection of ingredients
from the catalogues, but it’s easy to make mistakes. For example, you may
order six tape drives, but forget to order the controller cards or their cabinets,
forget that you cannot get all six clustered around the CPU and so will need
longer cables for some of them, forget that you may need a bigger power supply
to handle the controller for them and so on. DEC people have been heard to say
that this expert system saves them over ten million dollars per year. And others
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Email: asif@northern.edu.pk
Whatsapp# 03215551098
have been heard to say that it hasn’t saved any cost or staff, but that now the
staff are kept happy maintaining and extending the expert system.

Drilling Advisor was produced by Teknowledge, a leading ES firm, for Elf

Aquitaine, a large oil company. It offers advice to the drill team on an oil rig
about what to do when the drill gets stuck. Bearing in mind that an oil rig may
cost over 100,000 dollars per day to run, and that it may take a whole day to
remove a drill from the hole, anything that saves some time is likely to be
worthwhile.

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