Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Unit 1 of Artificial Intelligence

Purpose of this class:
to teach you the basics of artificial intelligence to excite you

Structure of the class:

VIDEOS QUIZZES ANSWER VIDEOS HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT EXAMS

Intelligent agent

The agent can perceive the state of the environment through its sensor, and it can affect its state through its actuators. The big question of artificial intelligence is the function that maps sensors to actuators. That is called the control policy for the agent. So all of this class will deal with how does an agent make decisions that it can carry out with its actuators based on past sensor data. Those decisions take place many, many times, and the loop of environment feedback to sensors, agent decision, actuator interaction with the environment and so on is

called perception action style.

AI in Finance

There is a huge number of applications of artificial intelligence in finance, very often in the shape of making trading decisions - in which case, the agent is called a trading agent. And the environment might be things like the stock market or the bond market or the commodities market. And our trading agent can sense the course of certain things, like the stock or bonds or commodities. It can also read the news online and follow certain events. And its decisions are usually things like buy or sell decisions - trades. Theres a huge history of artificial intelligence finding methods to look at data over time, and make predictions as to how courses develop over time, and then put in traits behind those. And vary frequently, people using artificial intelligence trading agents have made a good amount of money with superior trading decisions.

AI in Robotics

Theres also a long history of AI in Robotics. There are many different types of robots, and they all interact with their environments through their sensors, which include things like cameras, microphones, tactile sensors (or touch). And the way they impact their environments is to move motors around. In particular, their wheels, their legs, their arms, their grippers, then goes to say things to people using voice. Now theres huge history of using artificial intelligence in robotics. Pretty much, every robot that does something interesting today uses AI. In fact, often AI has been studied together with robotics, as one discipline. But because robots are somewhat special in that they use physical actuators and deal with physical environments, they are a little bit different from just artificial intelligence, as a whole. When the Web came out, the early Web crawlers were called robots and to block a robot from accessing your web site, to the present day, theres a file-block robot.txt, that allows you to deny any Web crawler to access and retrieve that information from your Web site. So historically, robotics played a huge role in artificial intelligence and a good chunk of this class will be focusing on robotics.

AI in Games

AI has a huge history in games - to make games smarter or feel more natural. There a two ways in which AI has been used in games, as a game agent. One is to play against you, as a human user. So for example, if you play the game of Chess, then you are the environment to the game agent. The game agent gets to observe your moves and it generates its own moves with the purpose of defeating you in Chess. So most AI-surreal games, where you play against an opponent - and the opponent is a computer program - the game agent is built to play against you - against your own interests - and make you lose. And of course, your objective is to win. Thats an AI games-type situation. The second thing is that games against in AI also are used to make games feel more natural. So very often, games have characters - and these characters act in some way. And its important for you, as the player, to feel that these characters are believable. Theres an entire sub-field of artificial intelligence to use AI to make characters in game more believable - look smarter, so to speak - so that, you as a player, think youre playing a better game.

AI in medicine

Artificial intelligence has a long history in medicine as well. The classic example is that of diagnostic agent. So here you are - and you might be sick, and you go to your doctor. And you doctor wishes to understand what the reason for your symptoms and your sickness is. The diagnostic agent will observe you through various measurements. For example, blood pressure and heart signals, and so on - and itll come up with the hypothesis as to what you might be suffering from. But rather than intervene directly - in most cases, the diagnostic of your disease is communicated to the doctor, who then takes on the intervention. This is called a diagnostic agent. There are many others versions of AI in medicine. AI is used in intensive care to understand whether there are situations that need immediate attention. Its been used for life-long medicine to monitor signs over a long period of time. And as medicine becomes more personal, the role of artificial intelligence will definitely increase.

AI in the Web

The most generic version of AI is to crawl the Web and understand the Web, and assist you in answering questions. So when you have this search box over here and it says Search on the left, and Im Felling Lucky on the right, and you type in a word, what AI does for you it understands what words you typed in and finds the most relevant pages. That is really coartificial intelligence. Its used by number of companies, such as Microsoft and Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and many others.

And the way this works is that theres a crawling agent that can go to the World Wide Web and retrieve pages, through just a computer program. It then sorts these pages into a big database inside the core and also analyzes developments of each page to any possible query. When

you then come and issue a query, the AI system is able to give you a response - for example, a collection of 10 best Web links. In short, every time you try to write a piece of software, that makes you appear, yourself, as smart likely you will need artificial intelligence. And this class, Peter and Sebastian will teach you many of the basic tricks of the trade to make your software really smart.

Terminology
It will be good to introduce some basic terminology that is commonly used in artificial intelligence to distinguish different types of problems: 1. FULLY versus PARTIAL OBSERVABLE An environment is called fully observable if what your agent can sense at any point in time is completely sufficient to make the optimal decision. So for example, in many card games, when all the cards are on the table, the momentary site of all those cards is really sufficient to make the optimal choice. That is in contrast to some other environments where you need memory on the side of the agent to make the best possible decisions. For example, in the game of poker, the cards are not openly on the table, and memorizing past moves will help you make a better decision.

The fully understand the difference, consider the interaction of an agent with the environment to is sensors and its actuators, and this interaction takes place over many cycles, often called the perception-action cycle. For many environments, its convenient to assume that the environment has some sort of internal state. For example in cards game where the cards are not openly on the table, the state might pertain to the cards in your hand. An environment is fully observable

if the sensors can always see the entire state of environment. Its partially observable if the sensors can only see a fraction of the state, yet memorizing past measurements gives us additional information of the state that is not readily observable right now. So any game, for example, where past moves have information about what might be in a persons hand, those games are partially observable, and they require different treatment. Very often agents that deal with partially observable environments need to acquire internal memory to understand what the state of the environment is, and well talk extensively when we talk about hidden Markov models about how this structure has such internal memory. 2. DETERMINISTIC versus STOCHASTIC Deterministic environment is one where your agents actions uniquely determine the outcome. So, for example, in chess, theres really no randomness when you move a piece. The effect of moving a piece is completely predetermined, and no matter where Im going to move the same piece, the outcome is the same. That we call deterministic. Games with dice, for example, like backgammon, are stochastic. While you can still deterministically move your pieces, the outcome of an action also involves throwing of the dice, and you cant predict those. Theres a certain amount of randomness involved for the outcome of dice, and therefore, we call this stochastic. 3. DISCRETE versus CONTINUOUS A discrete environment is one where you have finitely many action choices, and finitely many things you can sense. So, for example, in chess, again, theres finitely many board positions, and finitely many things you can do. That is different from a continuous environment where the space of possible actions or things you could sense may be infinite. So, for example, if you throw darts, theres infinitely many ways to angle the darts and to accelerate them. 4. BENIGN versus ADVERSARIAL In benign environments, the environment might be random. It might be stochastic, but it has no objective on its own that would contradict the own objective. So, for example, weather is benign. It might be random. It might affect the outcome of your actions. But it isnt really out there to get you. Contrast with adversarial environments, such as many games, like chess, where your opponent is really out there to get you. It turns out its much harder to find good actions in adversarial environments where the opponent actively observes you and counteracts what youre trying to achieve relative to benign environment, where the environment might merely be stochastic but isnt really interested in making your life worse.

AI and Uncertainty
AI is the technique of uncertainly management in computer software. But differently, AI is the discipline that you apply when you want to know what to do when you don't know what to do. Now, theres many reason why there might be uncertainty in a computer program. There could be a sensor limit. That is, your sensors are unable to tell me what exactly is the case outside the AI system. There could be adversaries who act in a way that makes it hard for you to

understand what is the case. There could be stochastic environments. Every time you roll the dice in a dice game, the stochasticity of the dice will make it impossible for you to be absolutely certain of whats the situation. There could be laziness. So perhaps you can actually compute what the situation is, but your computer program is just too lazy to do it. And ignorance, plain ignorance. Many people are just ignorant of whats going on. They could know it, but they just don't care. All of this things are cause for uncertainty. AI is discipline that deals with uncertainty and manages it in decision making.

Machine translation

One of the best successes of AI technology at Google has been the machine translation system. Here we see an example of an article in Italian automatically translated into English. Now, these system are built for 50 different languages, and we can translate from any of the languages into any of the other languages. So, thats over 2500 different systems, and weve done this all using machine learning techniques, using AI techniques, rather than build them by hand. And the way it works is that we go out and collect examples of text thats a line between the 2 languages. So we find, say, a newspaper that publishes 2 editions, and now we have examples of translations. And then when we see a new example of text that havent seen before, we can just look up what weve seen in the past for that correspondence. So the task is really two parts. Off-line, before we see example of text we want to translate, we first build our translation model. We do that by examining all of the different examples and figuring out which part aligns to which. Now, when were given a text to translate, we use that model, and we go thought and find the most probably translation.

For example, heres a bilingual text. Now, for large-scale machine translation, examples are found on the Web. This example was found in a Chinese restaurant by Adam Lopez. Now its given, for a text of this form , that a line in Chinese corresponds to a line in English, and thats true for each or individual lines. But to learn from this text, what we really want to discover is what individual words in Chinese correspond to individual words or small phrases in English. Ive started this process by highlighting the word wonton in English. It appears 3 times throughout the text. Now, in each of those lines, theres a character that appears, and thats only place in the Chinese text where that character appears. So, that seems like its a high probability that this character in Chinese corresponds to the world wonton in English.

Unit 1 Summary
key applications of AI intelligence agent 4 key attributes sources of uncertainty rationality