What is AI?

• People have been, since ages, irresistibly drawn to the idea

of creating intelligence outside the human body.

• Examples are numerous in Greek and European mythology

• More recent examples include the story of Frankenstein, and

the Star War robot characters

• Ever since the first computers were built, scientist have been
trying to make them intelligent

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 What is AI?

• The branch of computer science called Artificial Intelligence

is said to have been born at a conference held at
Dartmouth, USA, in 1956

• The scientists attending that conference represented several

different disciplines: mathematics, neurology,
psychology, electrical engineering, etc

• They had one thing in common:

They all were trying to use the recently developed
computers to simulate various aspects of human
intelligence

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 What is AI?

• Artificial Intelligence may be defined as the branch of

computer science that is concerned with the
automation of intelligent behavior

• Intelligence itself is not very well defined or understood

• So we will first study the problems, methodologies and

techniques investigated by AI researchers and
then try to find a definition of the field

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 What is AI?

• Artificial Intelligence may be defined as the branch of

computer science that is concerned with the
automation of intelligent behavior

• An exact definition of intelligence is not easy to formulate

• However, there are some general abilities which are

universally considered as intelligent

• According to Douglas Hofstadter these are:

- To respond to situations very flexibly
If the same response is exhibited each time,
the behavior is called mechanical

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 What is AI?

- To make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory

messages

- To recognize the relative importance of different

elements of a situation

- To find similarities between situations despite

differences which may separate them

- To draw distinctions between situations despite

similarities which may link them

These abilities are largely due to knowledge and

experience, which allows you to place an information
in its wider context 5
 What is AI?

• Many methods and techniques have been developed

under the umbrella of AI to simulate intelligent
behavior

• However, we are still far away from the goals set by

Hollywood movies like Terminator

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State Space Search

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 Problem Spaces

• Water Jug Problem

- We have two jugs of 4 gallon and 3 gallons capacity
- The jugs do not have any measuring markers
- How can we get exactly 2 gallons of water into the
4 gallon jug?

• We can solve the problem in our heads and encode the rules
or
• We can define the possible states for the problem and make
a list of legal or valid operations

• Our start state is (0,0) and our goal state is (2,n)

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Problem Spaces

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Problem Spaces

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 Problem Spaces
• The problem can now be seen as that of moving around in
the state space from one legal state to another

• The transition between states is by application of the

operators defined

• There are different possible strategies for selecting one of

the different possible states at each step

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 Problem Spaces
For defining any problem as a state space search we must:

• Define a state space that contains all the possible

configurations of the relevant objects. This does not
mean that all the states should be defined explicitly.
Example: (x,y) for water jug problem

• Specify one or more states as initial and one or more states

as final or goal states

• Specify a set of rules (operators) that describe the actions

available

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Problem Spaces

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 Blind Search

• Uninformed search
We are not informed about the quality of our choices

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Blind Search

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Blind Search

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Blind Search

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Blind Search

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 Depth First Search
Method
• When a state is examined, all of its children and their
descendants are examined before any of its siblings
• The siblings are considered only when no further descendants
of a state can be found

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Depth First Search

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Depth First Search

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 Depth First Search
Advantages
• It quickly goes deep into search space, hence it is efficient for
search spaces with many branches
• Requires less memory since only the nodes on the current
path are stored

Disadvantages
• Shortest path is not guaranteed. A state may be reached
by a longer path when it is encountered the first time. It
may get lost deep in a graph, missing shorter paths to a
goal. If the shortest path is required each state may be
stored as a triplet (state, parent, length-of-path)

Note that cost means computational cost expended when finding

a path and not the actual travel cost of traversing that path
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 Breadth First Search

Method
• It explores the space in a level by level fashion. Only when
no there are no more states to be explored at a given
level does the algorithm move on to the next level

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Breadth First Search

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 Breadth First Search

Advantages
• It is guaranteed to find the shortest path from the start
state to the goal state
• Because there is no chance that duplicate states may be
found along a better path, the algorithm simply
discards any duplicate states

Disadvantages
• If the branching factor is high and the goal is at deep levels,
this algorithm is not useful.
The memory required is high since at every level, all
of the tree that has been so far generated must be
stored

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 Depth first versus Breadth first

• To choose between depth first and breadth first, examine

the problem space carefully and consult experts in
the area.
Example: In chess, breadth first is not feasible

• If nothing is known about the search space a middle ground

between depth first and breadth first search may be
considered
- Non deterministic search
- Depth first with iterative deepening

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 Non-deterministic Search

• The node to expand is chosen at random from among the

open nodes

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 Depth First Search with Iterative Deepening

• A depth bound is used on depth-first search

• It performs a complete depth first search to a given depth.

If goal is not found, the depth bound is increased

• No information about the state space is retained between

iterations

• Since the number of nodes in a given level of the tree grows

exponentially with depth, almost all the time is spent
in the deepest level, even though shallower levels are
generated an arithmetically increasing number of
times

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