Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

CoSc 4142
Prerequisites: Logic in computer science

Kindie Alebachew (M.sc.)

College of Computing
Debre Berhan University, Ethiopia

2010 1
 Introduction
Why we are interested in AI?
To develop intelligent entities
AI is based on the premise that:
 Human mind can be explained in terms of
computation, and
 Computers can do the right thing given correct
premises and reasoning rules

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 What is AI?
• There are two ideas in the definition.
– Intelligence: Intelligence is the computational part of
the ability to achieve goals. It relates to tasks involving
higher mental process e.g. Creativity, Communicate,
problem solving, Pattern recognition, Classification,
Learning, Reasoning, Natural language processing and
understanding, Knowledge, Acting and many more.
– Artificial device: is a system with intelligent. Made
by human beings rather than occurring naturally,
typically the copy of something natural

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 Cont ...
• Accordingly there are two possibilities:
– A system with intelligence is expected to behave as
intelligently as a human
– A system with intelligence is expected to behave in the
best possible manner
• Given this scenario the AI can be defined as
– “The science and engineering of making intelligent
machines”, specifically computer program.
– AI is the study of the mental faculties through the use of
computational models (Chorniak and McDermolt 1985)
– The branch of CS that is concerned with the automation
of intelligent behaviour (Luger and Stubble field, 1993 )

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 Cont...
– The study of computations that make it possible to
perceive, reason, and act (Winston 1992)
– The exciting new effort to make computer think ....
Machines with minds, in the full and literal sense
(Haugeland,19 85)
– The art of creating machines that perform functions that
require intelligence when performed by people (Kurzweil
1990)
– The study of how to make computer to do things at
which, at the moment, people are better (Rich and Knight
1991)

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 AI Advocators
• AI advocators on the ultimate goal
– AI researchers are generally categorized as weak and
strong AI advocators
– Strong AI advocators
• In the future technologists will one day be able to build a
Objectives/Goals of AI

computer with all cognitive, memory, and emotional

capabilities of the human brain.
• They believe that computers will someday be more intelligent
than human beings
– Weak AI advocators
• If people need to make a computer that thinks, they should
replace the circuits with proteins
• They believe that we will achieve to build robust computer
systems that mostly provide decision support and decision
making

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 General AI goal
– Replicate human intelligent
– Solve knowledge intensive task
– Make an intelligent connection between
perception and action
– Enhance human-computer interaction/
communication

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 General AI goal
• Engineering based AI goal
– Develop concepts, theory and practice of building
intelligent machines
– Emphasis is on system building
• Science based AI goal
– Develop concepts, mechanisms and vocabulary to
understand biological intelligent behaviours
– Emphasis is on understanding intelligent
behaviours
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 Approaches of AI
• AI can be explained as approaches centered as
both around human and rationality
• The Humanistic-Centered approach
– The scientific part
– Involves an empirical science
– It involves two goals: THNKING AND ACTING
HUMANLY

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 Approaches of AI…
• Humanistic-centered approach
– Thinking Humanly: The Cognitive Modeling
• Reasons like humans do
– Programs that behaves like humans
– Example: Asked to write a program that play chess. Instead of
making the best possible chess-playing program, you would
make one that play chess like people do.
• Requires understanding of the internal activities of the
brain
– See how humans behave in certain situations and see if you
could make computers behave in that same way

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 Approaches of AI…
• Humanistic-centered approach…
– Acting Humanly: The Turing Test
• Can machines think?
• Can machines behave intelligently?
• Turing Test: Operational test for intelligent behavior
– Do experiments on the ability to achieve human-level
performance.
– Acting like humans require AI programs to interact
with people
– Suggested major components of AI: Knowledge,
reasoning, language understanding, learning
– “The touring test contest”– developing a system that
pass the touring test…

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 Approaches of AI…
• The Rationalist Approach
• Thinking rationally: The Laws of thought
– A system is rational if it thinks/does the right thing through
correct reasoning
– Aristotle provided that the correct arguments/ thought
structures that gave correct conclusions given correct
premises
– Abebe is a man, all men are moral: therefore Abebe is
mortal
– These laws of thought governed the operation of the mind
and initiated the filed of logic

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 Approaches of AI…
• Acting rationally: The rational agent
– Doing the right thing so as to achieve one’s goal,
given one’s beliefs.
– AI is the study and construction of rational agents
(an agent that perceives and acts)
– Rational actions requires the ability to represent
knowledge and reason with it so as to reach good
decision
• Learning for better understanding of how the world
works

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 AI Techniques
• Various techniques that have involved can be applied
to a variety of AI tasks. The techniques are concerned
with how we represent, manipulate and reason with
knowledge in order to solve problem.
• Techniques, not all “intelligent” but used to behave as
intelligent
– Describe and match, Constraint satisfaction, Generate and
Test, Goal reduction, Tree search, Rule based system
• Biology-inspired AI techniques are currently popular
– Neural Network
– Reinforcement learning
– Genetic Algorithms

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 History of AI
• The concept of intelligent machines is found in
Greek mythology. There is a story in the 8th
century A.D about Pygmalion Olio, the
legendary king of Cyprus. He fell in love with
an ivory statue he made to represent his ideal
woman.
• The king prayed to the goddess Aphrodite, and
the goddess miraculously brought the statue to
life.
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 History of AI
• Other myths involve human-like artifacts. As a
present from Zeus to Europa, Hephaestus
created Talos, a huge robot. Talos was made of
bronze and his duty was to patrol the beaches
of Crete.
• Aristotle (384-322 BC) developed an informal
system of syllogistic logic, which is the basis
of the first formal deductive reasoning system.

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 History of AI
• Early in the 17 th century, Descartes proposed
that bodies of animals are nothing more than
complex machines.
• Pascal in 1642 made the first mechanical
digital calculating machine. In the 19 th century,
George Boole developed a binary algebra
representing (some) "laws of thought."

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 History of AI
• Charles Babbage & Ada Byron worked on
programmable mechanical calculating
machines. In the late 19th century and early
20th century, mathematical philosophers like
Gottlob Frege, Bertram Russell, Alfred North
Whitehead, and Kurt Gödel built on Boole's
initial logic concepts to develop mathematical
representations of logic problems.

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 History of AI
• Formally initiated in 1956 and the name AI was
coined by John McCarthy
• The advent of general purpose computers provided a
vehicle for creating artificially intelligent entities.
• Development of knowledge-based systems: the key to
power
– Performance of general-purpose problem solving methods is
weak for complex domains
– Use knowledge more suited to make better reasoning in
narrow areas of expertise (like human experts do)
– Early knowledge intensive system include:
• The Dendral program (1969): solved the problem of inferring
molecular structure.
• MYCIN (1976): used for medical diagnosis:

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 History of AI…
• Shifts from procedural to declarative
programming paradigm
– Rather than telling the computer how to compute a
solution, a program consists of a knowledge base
of facts and relationships
– Rather than running a program to obtain a solution,
the user asks question so that the system searches
through the KB to determine the answer

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 Limits of AI today
• Today’s successful AI systems operate in well-
defined domains and employ narrow, specialized
knowledge.
• Common sense knowledge is needed to function
in complex, open-ended worlds. Such a system
also needs to understand unconstrained natural
language.
• However these capabilities are not yet fully
present in today’s intelligent systems.
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What can AI systems NOT do yet?

– Understand natural language robustly (e.g.,

read and understand articles in a newspaper)
– Surf the web
– Interpret an arbitrary visual scene
– Learn a natural language
– Construct plans in dynamic real-time
domains
– Exhibit true autonomy and intelligence
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 Applications of AI
• AI is concerned with automating both the
Mundane and experts tasks.
• Categories of AI applications include:
– Mundane Tasks (Pattern recognition)
– Natural Language Processing (NLP: generation,
translation, understanding)
– Formal Tasks (Games, Puzzles, Mathematics)
– Expert Tasks (Medical Diagnosis, Fault Finding,
Engineering)
– Paradoxically, it turns out that it is the Mundane
task that is generally much the hardest to
automate

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 Applications of AI
• Subfields of AI
• Following are major subfields of AI
– Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• It enables computers communicate in human language,
English Amharic…)
– Knowledge Representations (KR)
• Schemas to store information, both facts and inferences,
before and during interrogation
– Automatic Reasoning
• Uses stored information to answer questions and draw
new conclusions

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 Applications of AI
• Subfields of AI…
– Machine learning
• Adapt to new circumstances and accumulate knowledge
– Computer vision
• Recognize objects based on patterns in the same way as
the human visual system
– Robotics
• Produce mechanical device capable of controlling
motion; which enable computers see, hear and take
actions

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Famous AI systems that have been
developed over the years
• ALVINN
• DEEP BLUE
• MACHINE TRANSLATION
• AUTONOMOUS AGENTS
• INTERNET AGENTS

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End of chapter one

2010 27