Lecture 1: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

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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

• An exact definition of intelligence is not easy to formulate

• However, there are some general abilities which are

universally considered as intelligent

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 What is AI?

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.
To survive in changing environments, one need to exhibit
innovative behavior (e.g. art of begging)

- To make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages

We understand such messages because our knowledge
and experience allows us to place them in context.
(e.g. time flies like an arrow, buy this washing powder
versus buy that washing powder)

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 What is AI?

- To recognize the relative importance of different elements

of a situation
(e.g. quality versus price of a commodity)

- To find similarities between situations despite differences

which may separate them
(e.g. chairs in two different pictures)

- To draw distinctions between situations despite similarities

which may link them
(e.g. differences in two cars)

These abilities are largely due to knowledge and experience,

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

Another definition of intelligence:

It is the ability to
- perceive inter-relationship of facts
- learn and understand from experience
- acquire and retain knowledge
- respond quickly and successfully to a new
situation

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 What is AI?

Turing test was proposed in 1950.

It is a test to decide whether or not a particular

machine is intelligent.

Predicted that by 2000, a machine might have a 30%

chance of fooling a lay person for 5 minutes

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 What is AI?

- Contact only through monitor and keyboard

- Machine tries to pose as a human
- If the player cannot distinguish between human and
machine, then machine is considered intelligent

Revised Turing Test: A human converses with an unseen

respondent and attempts to determine whether it is a
man or machine. If the computer fools you into
thinking that it is a human, than that machine is
intelligent

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 What is AI?

Sometimes it is possible to program computers to carry on

shallow conversations, in limited areas, and thus fool
unsuspecting humans into believing that they are
addressing other humans.

Example: Program ELIZA simulating a psychiatrist.

Person: I miss my children
ELIZA: “Why do you miss your children?”
or “ Tell me more about your family”

ELIZA is programmed to ask pre-determined questions

and parrot segments of your responses back to you.
Hence Turing test may not be such a good judge of
machine intelligence after all
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 What is AI?

This leads us to the issue of “understanding”

Even though a machine may be exhibiting intelligent

behaviour, it does not “understands” what it is doing

Searle’s Chinese Room Example

Strong and Weak AI

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 Major AI Areas

1. Expert Systems
An ES is a computer program designed to act as an expert
in a particular domain (area of expertise). It typically includes a
sizeable knowledge base, consisting of facts about the domain and
rules for application to those facts. Medical (e.g. PXDES,
MYCIN) and Agriculture (e.g. AGREX)
2. Natural Language Processing
Goal is to enable people and computers to communicate in
ordinary or natural English.
- Comprehension of natural language:
Keyboard input (e.g. MS Word
Processor), speech recognition (e.g. IBM VoiceType
Dictation , BBN corporation: voice
activated browsers, speaker identification
for security and Operetta™)
- Generation of natural language.
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 Major AI Areas

3. Machine learning
Field of study that gives computer the ability to learn
without being explicitly programmed (Arthur Samuel, 1956)
ML learning provides best methods for
developing particular kinds of software, in
applications where:
1. Application is too much
complex for people to manually
design the algorithm. For instance,
soft- wares for sensor-based
prediction tasks such as speech
recognition and computer vision.

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 Major AI Areas

3. Machine learning
Field of study that gives computer the ability to learn
without being explicitly programmed (Arthur Samuel, 1956)
ML learning provides best methods for
developing particular kinds of software, in
applications where:
2. Applications require that the
software customize to its operational
environment after it is fielded. For
example, speech recognition system
that customize to the user who
purchase the software or recommenders

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 Major AI Areas

4. Robotics and Computer Vision

Factory automation
Autonomous vehicles
Robots: Electromechanical devices programmed
to perform manual tasks. Not all robots are
intelligent. Some are pre-programmed by conventional
techniques and are dumb. An intelligent robot usually
includes some kind of sensory apparatus that
allows it to respond to changes in its environment.
Computer Vision: it is field that include methods
for acquiring, processing, analyzing and
understanding images in order to produce numerical and
symbolic information. For example, medical image
processing is an application of computer vision
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