Chapter One
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
(AI)
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What is artificial intelligence?
The branch of computer science that is concerned with
automation of intelligent behavior.
Intelligence refers to the ability to:
Perceive interrelationship of facts.
Learn and understand from experience.
Acquire and retain knowledge.
Respond quickly and successfully to new situations.
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Definitions of AI
The study of how to make programs/computers do things that people
do better.
The study of how to make computers solve problems which require
knowledge and intelligence.
The automation of activities that we associate with human thinking
(e.g., decision-making, learning…)
The art of creating machines that perform functions that require
intelligence when performed by people.
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Cont.
A field of study that seeks to explain and emulate intelligent
behavior in terms of computational processes.
The branch of computer science that is concerned with the
automation of intelligent behavior.
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Goals/objectives of AI
The goal of artificial intelligence is to create technology that allows
computers and machines to work intelligently. These goals include
the following:
To create expert systems- the system which exhibits intelligent
behaviour, learn, demonstrate, explain and advise its user.
To implement human intelligence in machine- creating systems that
think, learn and behave like humans.
To make computers more useful by letting them take over
dangerous or tedious tasks from human.
Understand principles of human intelligence.
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Types of AI
1) General AI: refers to AI systems that has the ability to learn,
perceive, understand, and function completely like a human being.
General AI systems are just as capable as humans by replicating
our multi-functional capabilities.
2) Specific AI: refers to AI systems that can only perform a specific
task autonomously using human-like capabilities. These machines
can do nothing more than what they are programmed to do, and
thus have a very limited or narrow range of competencies.
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Approaches to AI
There are four main views of AI in the literature, listed below.
1) Acting humanly, i.e., acting like a person. The classic example
of this is the “Turing test”
2) Thinking humanly, i.e., thinking like a person. The field of
Cognitive Science delves into this topic, trying to model how
humans think. The difference between “acting humanly” and
“thinking humanly” is that the first is only concerned with the
actions, the outcome or product of the human’s thinking process;
whereas the latter is concerned with modeling human thinking
processes.
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Cont.
3) Thinking rationally, i.e., modeling thinking as a logical process,
where conclusions are drawn based on some type of symbolic logic.
4) Acting rationally, i.e., performing actions that increase the value
of the state of the agent or environment in which the agent is acting.
For example, an agent that is playing a game will act rationally if it
tries to win the game.
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Thinking Humanly
Thinking humanly refers to trying to understand and model how the
human mind works.
There are (at least) two possible routes that humans use to find the
answer to a question:
We reason about it to find the answer. This is called “introspection”.
We conduct experiments to find the answer, drawing upon scientific
techniques to conduct controlled experiments and measure change.
The field of Cognitive Science focuses on modeling how people
think.
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Acting Humanly (Turning Test)
This is a problem that has greatly troubled AI researchers for years.
The most famous response is attributed to Alan Turing, a British
mathematician and computing pioneer. The famous “Turing Test”
was named after him, based on ideas he expressed in a paper
published in 1950.
Human interrogates entity via teletype for 5 minutes. If, after 5
minutes, human cannot tell whether entity is human or machine, then
the entity must be counted as intelligent.
To date, no program has yet passed the Turing.
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Cont.
In order to pass the Turing Test, a program that succeeded would
need to be capable of:
Speech recognition,
Natural language understanding and generation, and speech
synthesis;
Knowledge representation;
Learning; and automated reasoning and decision making. (Note
that the basic Turing Test does not specify a visual or aural
component.)
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The Truing test
Three rooms contain: a person, a computer and a human interrogator.
The interrogator communicates with the human and computer by
teletype (to avoid the machine imitate the appearance of voice of the
person).
The interrogator tries to determine which the person is and which the
machine is. The machine tries to fool the interrogator to believe that
it is the human, and the person also tries to convince the interrogator
that it is the human.
If the machine succeeds in fooling the interrogator, then conclude
that the machine is intelligent.
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Cont.
Fig. 1.1.Turing test, the human interrogator outside room,
a computer and human inside room
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Thinking rationally
Trying to understand how we actually think is one route to AI.
But another approach is to model how we should think.
The “thinking rationally” approach to AI uses symbolic logic to
capture the laws of rational thought as symbols that can be
manipulated.
Reasoning involves manipulating the symbols according to well-
defined rules, kind of like algebra.
The result is an idealized model of human reasoning. This approach
is attractive to theoretists, i.e., modeling how humans should think
and reason in an ideal world.
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Acting rationally
Acting rationally means acting to achieve one’s goals, given one’s
beliefs or understanding about the world. An intelligent agent is one
that acts rationally with respect to its goals.
Constructing an intelligent agent, emphasis shifts from designing the
theoretically best decision-making procedure to designing the best
decision-making procedure possible within the circumstances in
which the agent is acting.
Logical approaches may be used to help find the best action, but
there are also other approaches.
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The foundations of AI
Many older disciplines contribute to a foundation for artificial
intelligence:
1) Philosophy: logic, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science,
philosophy of mathematics.
2) Mathematics: logic, probability theory, theory of computability.
3) Psychology: behaviourism, cognitive psychology
4) Computer Science & Engineering: hardware, algorithms,
computational complexity theory.
5) Linguistics: theory of grammar, syntax, semantics.
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History of AI and state of the art
The 1943-1955, the gestation of Artificial Intelligence:
Turning test was conducted in the 1950s.
In 1956-Jhon McCarthy developed programming languages for AI.
The term Artificial Intelligence were coined by McCarthy in 1956.
LISP, were developed by McCarthy in 1958.
1970-1980- knowledge based systems were introduced- example: Mycin:
medical diagnosis .
AI becomes an industry (1980-90)- R1: first successful commercial expert
system was developed.
1995-2019- Agents were created, example Alexa, Siri and Cortana on
Windows 10.
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Applications of AI
Speech recognition- example intelligent digital personal assistant.
Face recognition- example unlocking phone.
Medical diagnosis- patient would enter the symptoms and the
machine advises on the treatment of patient. Prescribe related
medicine.
Transportation- self driving cars.
Robotics- the design and implementation of electro-mechanical
device that can be programmed to perform manual tasks.
Vision systems- systems that understand, interpret and comprehend
visual input on the computer.
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Review questions
1) Define artificial intelligence?
2) What is turning test?
3) What are the applications of cognitive psychology in artificial
intelligence?
4) What is the difference between general and specific AI systems?
5) What are the applications of Ai in medical diagnosis?
6) How do we create systems that can think intelligently?
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