ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Semester 7
Textbook: S. Russell and P. Norvig Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach Prentice Hall, 2003, Second Edition Instructor: Sunil Paudel (sunilpaudel@gmail.com) Grading: Assignments/Tutorials, Midterm test, Assessment Class hour: Monday and Thursday

Introduction: Chapter 1
What is AI?
There is no single definition of AI, but it can be define in several ways: AI can be defined as the study of agents that receive percepts from environment and perform actions. It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. AI is the study of how to make computers do things which, at the moment, people do better.

Definition of AI from different authors categorized in 4 groups: Systems that think like humans "The exciting new effort to make computers think ... machines with minds, in the full and literal sense." (Haugeland, 1985) "[The automation of] activities that we associate with human thinking, activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning ..." (Bellman, 1978) Systems that act like humans "The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people." (Kurzweil, 1990) "The study of how to make computers do Systems that think rationally "The study of mental faculties through the use of computational models." (Charniak and McDermott, 1985) "The study of the computations that make it possible to perceive, reason, and act." (Winston, 1992) Systems that act rationally "Computational Intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent agents." (Poole etal, 1998) "AI ...is concerned with intelligent behavior in artifacts. (Nilsson,1998)

Acting humanly: The Turing Test approach The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing (1950), was designed to provide a satisfactory operational definition of intelligence. He suggested a test based on indistinguishability from undeniably intelligent entitieshuman beings. The computer passes the test if a human interrogator, after posing some written questions, cannot tell whether the written responses come from a person or not. To pass the test the computer would need to possess the following capabilities: Natural Language Processing to enable it to communicate successfully in English. Knowledge representation to store what it knows or hears; Automated reasoning to use the stored information to answer questions and to draw new conclusions Machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate patterns.

Fig. The imitation game

Acting rationally: The rational agent approach An agent is just something that acts {agent comes from the Latin agere, to do). But computer agents are expected to have other attributes that distinguish them from mere "programs," such as operating under autonomous control, perceiving their environment, persisting over a prolonged time period, adapting to change, and being capable of taking on another's goals. The rational behavior is doing the right thing. Here, doing the right thing is that which is expected to maximize goal achievement, given the available information. Abstractly, an agent is a function from percept histories to actions: [f: P* A] For any given class of environments and tasks, we seek the agent (or class of agents) with the best performance

This course is about designing rational agents.

AI prehistory Philosophy Logic, methods of reasoning, mind as physical system foundations of learning, language, rationality Formal representation and proof algorithms, computation, (un)decidability, (in)tractability, probability utility, decision theory physical substrate for mental activity phenomena of perception and motor control, experimental techniques building fast computers

Mathematics

Economics Neuroscience Psychology Computer engineering

Control theory design systems that maximize an objective function over time Linguistics knowledge representation, grammar

Abridged history of AI
1943 1950 1956 1950s McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" Dartmouth meeting: "Artificial Intelligence" adopted Early AI programs, including Samuel's checkers program, Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist, Gelernter's Geometry Engine 1965 Robinson's complete algorithm for logical reasoning 196673 AI discovers computational complexity, neural network research almost disappears 196979 early development of knowledge-based systems 1980-AI becomes an industry 1986-Neural networks return to popularity 1987-AI becomes a science 1995-The emergence of intelligent agents

State of the art

Today, there are several activities that AI can do, some of them are:

Game playing: IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer program to defeat the world champion in a chess match when it bested Garry Kasparov by a score of 3.5 to 2.5 in an exhibition match in 1997. Autonomous control: The A LVINN computer vision system was trained to steer a car to keep it following a lane. It was placed in CMU's N AV L AB computer-controlled minivan and used to navigate across the United Statesfor 2850 miles it was in control of steering the vehicle 98% of the time. A human took over the other 2%, mostly at exit ramps. N AV L AB has video cameras that transmit road images to A LVINN , which then computes the best direction to steer, based on experience from previous training runs. Language understanding and problem solving: P ROVERB is a computer program that solves crossword puzzles better than most humans, using constraints on possible word fillers, a large database of past puzzles, and a variety of information sources including dictionaries and online databases such as a list of movies and the actors that appear in them.