Ch1 AI:

History and Applications

Dr. Bernard Chen Ph.D.
University of Central Arkansas
Spring 2011

Outline

AI History
Overview of AI application areas

History

There are two consequences of

mind/body analysis essential to the
AI enterprise:

Mental processes have an existence of

their own, obey their own laws, and can
be studied in and of themselves
Once the mind and the body are
separated, philosophers found it
necessary to find a way to reconnect the
two

History: AI and the

Rationalist

Modern research issues in AI are formed

and evolve through a combination of
historical, social and cultural pressures.
The rationalist tradition had an early
proponent in Plato, and was continued
on through the writings of Pascal,
Descates, and Liebniz
For the rationalist, the external world is
reconstructed through the clear and
distinct ideas of a mathematics

History: Development of
Formal Logic

The goal of creating a formal language

for thought also appears in the work of
George Boole, another 19th century
mathematician whose work must be
included in the roots of AI
The importance of Booles
accomplishment is in the extraordinary
power and simplicity of the system he
devised: Three Operations

History: the Turning Test

The imitation game (1950)

Outline

AI History
Overview of AI application
areas

AI application areas

Game Playing

Much of the early research in state space

search was done using common board
games such as checkers, chess, and the 15puzzle
Games can generate extremely large search
spaces. Theses are large and complex
enough to require powerful techniques for
determining what alternative to explore

AI application areas

Automated reasoning and Theorem

Proving

Theorem-proving is one of the most fruitful

branches of the field
Theorem-proving research was responsible in
formalizing search algorithms and
developing formal representation languages
such as predicate calculus and the logic
programming language

AI application areas

Expert System

One major insight gained from early

work in problem solving was the
importance of domain-specific
knowledge
Expert knowledge is a combination of a
theoretical understanding of the problem
and a collection of heuristic problemsolving rules

AI application areas

Expert System

Current deficiencies:

Lack of flexibility; if human cannot

answer a question immediately, he can
return to an examination of first principle
and come up something
Inability to provide deep
explanations
Little learning from experience

AI application areas

Natural Language Understanding

and Semantics

One of the long-standing goals of AI is

the creation of programming that are
capable of understanding and
generating human language

AI application areas

Modeling Human Performance

Capture the human mind (knowledge

representation)

AI application areas

Robotics

A robot that blindly performs a

sequence of actions without responding
to changes or being able to detect and
correct errors could hardly considered
intelligent
It should have some degree of sensors
and algorithms to guild it

AI application areas

Machine Learning

Learning has remained a challenging

area in AI
An expert system may perform
extensive and costly computation to
solve a problem; unlike human, it
usually dont remember the solution

Decision Tree Example

AI application areas

Alternative representations

Neural Networks

Genetic Algorithm