Artificial Intelligence

An Introduction

Stewart Merricks
What is Artificial Intelligence?
• Understand intelligence
• Also to build it
• How can tiny brain make sense of
massive world and manipulate it to
its own ends
• Some subfields ……
 Computational Reaction

• Animals and humans react in the “right way”

to the real world.
• How do we get computational systems to
react similarly?
• Does the right reaction count as
intelligence?
• Alan Turing said “yes”.

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“What does it
mean for a
computer to
be
intelligent?”

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 Computational Reaction
What is computational intelligence?
Turing Test
If after 10 minutes of interrogation the judge
thinks the computer is human then it is
intelligent.

Turing’s Prediction
“Within 50 years [year 2000] the computer would
be chosen at least 30% of the time.”
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John McCarthy
Artificial
Intelligence

1956
Dartmouth
College

``every aspect
of intelligence
can in
principle be
so precisely
described that
a machine
can be made AI1 6
to simulate it."
Minsky’s Prediction “Within 10 years computers
won't even keep us as pets”

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 Intelligent
Robot
Test
to build a team of
autonomous robots
that can beat world
champions.

Challenge is to do it
by 2050 AI1 8
 d’Inverno Test
To build a computational system that can
pass as a bass player for one night.

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 System of Animals
Game of Life
• John Conway, in Scientific American 1972.
• Represents a system of *very* simple creatures.
• Some locations are populated.
• Some locations are not populated.
• Each location has between 0 and 8 living
neighbours.

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 Complex Reaction
stimulus-response
• If you are alive
– and you have only one or zero neighbours then you
die
– and you have four or more neighbours then you die
– and you have two or three neighbours then you
survive

• If you are an empty location

– and there are exactly three neighbours then you
become populated
– Demo

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Different Approaches to AI
1. Systems that act like
humans/animals
2. Systems that think like
humans
3. Systems that think rationally
4. Systems that act rationally
 Acting Humanly
Turing Test

understand natural language

represent knowledge
understand humans - model of us -
empathy
what else might such a machine
need?
 Thinking Humanly

• cognitive science
• inside workings of the mind
• introspection
• psychological experimentation
• needs humans!
 Thinking rationally
• Laws of thought
• Aristotle: irrefutable arguments
• Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, socrates
is mortal

• Formal Logic
• Problems
• Many things are not 100%
• in principle vs. in practice (the world is not ideal
and it is dynamic …… )
• can take forever!
 Acting Rationally
Rational Agents

• Set of beliefs
• Set of goals
• Attempts to achieve those goals
• Reason vs. Reflex
• We need everything from AI to build a
rational agent.
Practical approach to investigating AI
 Foundations of Artificial
Intelligence
• Philosophy
• Free will, mind-body

• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Computer Engineering
• Linguistics
History of Artificial Intelligence
• Dartmouth College in 1956
• won drafts competition in 1956
• Shakey the robot
• ideal worlds
• blocks world
• no scaling up

• Simon - “machines can think” - 1964

• expert systems
• 1987 - present - real world problems
 Focus on Agents
• Rational Agents
• Performance Measure
• how “well” are they doing

• Senses
• Acts
• Environment
• State
• Program/architecture