Artificial Intelligence

Que 1

Ans: Heuristics are "rules of thumb".

A heuristic is an attempt at guessing an answer to a problem, which could be correct, but does not guarantee it to be correct (or even suitable). A common method of applying heuristics is to state the problem, record a number of possible solutions, and then eliminate those which are least likely to be correct. Continue comparing and eliminating until only one answer is left. That one is probably the closest to being correct.

As an adjective, heuristic (pronounced hyu-RIS-tik and from the Greek "heuriskein" meaning "to discover") pertains to the process of gaining knowledge or some desired result by intelligent guesswork rather than by following some preestablished formula. (Heuristic can be contrasted with algorithm ic.) The term seems to have two usages: 1) Describing an approach to learning by trying without necessarily having an organized hypothesis or way of proving that the results proved or disproved the hypothesis. That is, "seatof-the-pants" or "trial-by-error" learning. 2) Pertaining to the use of the general knowledge gained by experience, sometimes expressed as "using a rule-of-thumb." (However, heuristic knowledge can be applied to complex as well as simple everyday problems. Human chess players use a heuristic approach.) As a noun, a heuristic is a specific rule-of-thumb or argument derived from experience. The application of heuristic knowledge to a problem is sometimes known as heuristics .

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is one which has commanded much attention of mathematicians and computer scientists specifically because it is so easy to describe and so difficult to solve. The problem can simply be stated as: if a traveling salesman wishes to visit exactly once each of a list of m cities (where the cost of traveling from city i to city j is cij) and then return to the home city, what is the least costly route the traveling salesman can take?

Que2 1.

Knowledge Manipulation

Many problems that humans are confronted with are not fully understood. This partial understanding is reflected in the fact that a rigid algorithmic solutiona routine and predetermined number of computational steps cannot be applied. Rather, the concept of search is used to solve such problems. When search is used to explore the entire solution space, it is said to be exhaustive. Exhaustive search is not typically a successful approach to problem solving because most interesting problems have search spaces that are simply too large to be dealt with in this manner, even by the fastest computers. Therefore, if one hopes to find a solution (or a reasonably good approximation of a solution) to such a problem, one must selectively explore the problem's search space. The difficulty here is that if part of the search space is not explored, one runs the risk that the solution one seeks will be missed. Thus, in order toignore a portion of a search space, some guiding knowledge or insight must exist so that the solution will not be overlooked. Heuristics is a major area of AI that concerns itself with how to limit effectively the exploration of a search space. Chess is a classic example where humans routinely employ sophisticated heuristics in a search space. A chess player will typically search through a small number of possible moves before selecting a move to play. Not every possible move and countermove sequence is explored. Only reasonable sequences are examined. A large part of the intelligence of chess players resides in the heuristics they employ. A heuristic-based search results from the application of domain or problemspecific knowledge to a universal search function. The success of heuristics has led to focusing the application of general AI techniques to specific problem domains. This has led to the development of expert systems capable of sophisticated reasoning in narrowly defined domains within fields such as medicine, mathematics, chemistry, robotics, and aviation. Another area that is profoundly dependent on domain-specific knowledge is natural language processing. The ability to understand a natural language such as English is one of the most fundamental aspects of human intelligence, and presents one of the core challenges for the AI community. Small children routinely engage in natural language processing, yet it appears to be almost beyond the reach of mechanized computation. Over the years, significant

progress has been made in the ability to parse text to discover its syntactic structure. However, much of the meaning in natural language is contextdependent as well as culture-dependent, and capturing such dependencies has proved highly resistant to automation.

Associative Neural-networks

Neural networks can be classified as either pattern-classifiers or pattern-associators. Pattern-classifiers take an input vector and output a value that can be used to classify it. For example, taking a sonar signal and classifying it as either a rock or a mine. Perceptrons and Adaline networks are examples of such classifiers. A pattern-associator network is a net that takes a given input vector and outputs another vector. There are two types of associative networks, hetero-associative (HA) and auto-associative (AA). Hetero-associative takes an input vector and outputs a completely different vector. For example, an HA-net could be used to take a sound file and output the text that it represents (or the closest learned text). Auto-associative networks take input and output the same vector. How is this useful? An AA-net could learn various vectors, then when a corrupted vector came in, it would be corrected by the net. This can be used in image-recognition of partial or corrupted ("noisy") images. It is auto-associative networks that this essay will focus on, or more specifically the Hopfield network.