2010-2011

Term-paper Topic
Artificial intelligence

Submitted by:
Name:satyam pandey
Roll no:04
Reg no:10807962
Section:D1802
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that
aims to create it. Textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents," where an
intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances
of success. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as "the science and engineering of
making intelligent machines."
The field was founded on the claim that a central property of humans, intelligence—the sapience of
Homo sapiens—can be so precisely described that it can be simulated by a machine. This raises
philosophical issues about the nature of the mind and limits of scientific hubris, issues which have been
addressed by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity. Artificial intelligence has been the subject of
optimism, but has also suffered setbacks and, today, has become an essential part of the technology
industry, providing the heavy lifting for many of the most difficult problems in computer science.
AI research is highly technical and specialized, deeply divided into subfields that often fail to
communicate with each other. Subfields have grown up around particular institutions, the work of
individual researchers, the solution of specific problems, longstanding differences of opinion about
how AI should be done and the application of widely differing tools. The central problems of AI
include such traits as reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, communication, perception and the
ability to move and manipulate objects. General intelligence (or "strong AI") is still a long-term goal of
(some) research.
History

Thinking machines and artificial beings appear in Greek myths, such as Talos of Crete, the golden
robots of Hephaestus and Pygmalion's Galatea. Human likenesses believed to have intelligence were
built in every major civilization: animated statues were worshipped in Egypt and Greece and humanoid
automatons were built by Yan Shi, Hero of Alexandria, Al-Jazari and Wolfgang von Kempelen. It was
also widely believed that artificial beings had been created by Jābir ibn Hayyān, Judah Loew and
Paracelsus. By the 19th and 20th centuries, artificial beings had become a common feature in fiction, as
in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Pamela
McCorduck argues that all of these are examples of an ancient urge, as she describes it, "to forge the
gods". Stories of these creatures and their fates discuss many of the same hopes, fears and ethical
concerns that are presented by artificial intelligence.
Mechanical or "formal" reasoning has been developed by philosophers and mathematicians since
antiquity. The study of logic led directly to the invention of the programmable digital electronic
computer, based on the work of mathematician Alan Turing and others. Turing's theory of computation
suggested that a machine, by shuffling symbols as simple as "0" and "1", could simulate any
conceivable act of mathematical deduction. This, along with recent discoveries in neurology,
information theory and cybernetics, inspired a small group of researchers to begin to seriously consider
the possibility of building an electronic brain.
The field of AI research was founded at a conference on the campus of Dartmouth College in the
summer of 1956. The attendees, including John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell and Herbert
Simon, became the leaders of AI research for many decades. They and their students wrote programs
that were, to most people, simply astonishing: computers were solving word problems in algebra,
proving logical theorems and speaking English. By the middle of the 1960s, research in the U.S. was
heavily funded by the Department of Defense and laboratories had been established around the world.
AI's founders were profoundly optimistic about the future of the new field: Herbert Simon predicted
that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do" and Marvin
Minsky agreed, writing that "within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will
substantially be solved".
They had failed to recognize the difficulty of some of the problems they faced. In 1974, in response to
the criticism of England's Sir James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from Congress to fund more
productive projects, the U.S. and British governments cut off all undirected, exploratory research in AI.
The next few years, when funding for projects was hard to find, would later be called an "AI winter".
In the early 1980s, AI research was revived by the commercial success of expert systems, a form of AI
program that simulated the knowledge and analytical skills of one or more human experts. By 1985 the
market for AI had reached over a billion dollars. At the same time, Japan's fifth generation computer
project inspired the U.S and British governments to restore funding for academic research in the field.
However, beginning with the collapse of the Lisp Machine market in 1987, AI once again fell into
disrepute, and a second, longer lasting AI winter began.
In the 1990s and early 21st century, AI achieved its greatest successes, albeit somewhat behind the
scenes. Artificial intelligence is used for logistics, data mining, medical diagnosis and many other areas
throughout the technology industry. The success was due to several factors: the incredible power of
computers today (see Moore's law), a greater emphasis on solving specific subproblems, the creation of
new ties between AI and other fields working on similar problems, and above all a new commitment by
researchers to solid mathematical methods and rigorous scientific standards.
Problems
The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken down into a number of
specific sub-problems. These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers would like an
intelligent system to display. The traits described below have received the most attention.
Deduction, reasoning, problem solving
Early AI researchers developed algorithms that imitated the step-by-step reasoning that humans were
often assumed to use when they solve puzzles, play board games or make logical deductions. By the
late 1980s and '90s, AI research had also developed highly successful methods for dealing with
uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics.
For difficult problems, most of these algorithms can require enormous computational resources — most
experience a "combinatorial explosion": the amount of memory or computer time required becomes
astronomical when the problem goes beyond a certain size. The search for more efficient problem
solving algorithms is a high priority for AI research.
Human beings solve most of their problems using fast, intuitive judgments rather than the conscious,
step-by-step deduction that early AI research was able to model. AI has made some progress at
imitating this kind of "sub-symbolic" problem solving: embodied agent approaches emphasize the
importance of sensorimotor skills to higher reasoning; neural net research attempts to simulate the
structures inside human and animal brains that give rise to this skill.
Knowledge representation

Knowledge representation and knowledge engineering are central to AI research. Many of the problems
machines are expected to solve will require extensive knowledge about the world. Among the things
that AI needs to represent are: objects, properties, categories and relations between objects; situations,
events, states and time; causes and effects; knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what
other people know); and many other, less well researched domains. A complete representation of "what
exists" is an ontology (borrowing a word from traditional philosophy), of which the most general are
called upper ontologies.
Among the most difficult problems in knowledge representation are:
Default reasoning and the qualification problem
 Many of the things people know take the form of "working assumptions." For example, if a bird
comes up in conversation, people typically picture an animal that is fist sized, sings, and flies.
None of these things are true about all birds. John McCarthy identified this problem in 1969 as
the qualification problem: for any commonsense rule that AI researchers care to represent, there
tend to be a huge number of exceptions. Almost nothing is simply true or false in the way that
abstract logic requires. AI research has explored a number of solutions to this problem.
The breadth of commonsense knowledge
The number of atomic facts that the average person knows is astronomical. Research projects
that attempt to build a complete knowledge base of commonsense knowledge (e.g., Cyc) require
enormous amounts of laborious ontological engineering — they must be built, by hand, one
complicated concept at a time. A major goal is to have the computer understand enough
concepts to be able to learn by reading from sources like the internet, and thus be able to add to
its own ontology.
The subsymbolic form of some commonsense knowledge
Much of what people know is not represented as "facts" or "statements" that they could actually
say out loud. For example, a chess master will avoid a particular chess position because it "feels
too exposed" or an art critic can take one look at a statue and instantly realize that it is a fake.
These are intuitions or tendencies that are represented in the brain non-consciously and sub-
symbolically. Knowledge like this informs, supports and provides a context for symbolic,
conscious knowledge. As with the related problem of sub-symbolic reasoning, it is hoped that
situated AI or computational intelligence will provide ways to represent this kind of knowledge.
] Planning

Intelligent agents must be able to set goals and achieve them. They need a way to visualize the future
(they must have a representation of the state of the world and be able to make predictions about how
their actions will change it) and be able to make choices that maximize the utility (or "value") of the
available choices.
In classical planning problems, the agent can assume that it is the only thing acting on the world and it
can be certain what the consequences of its actions may be. However, if this is not true, it must
periodically check if the world matches its predictions and it must change its plan as this becomes
necessary, requiring the agent to reason under uncertainty.
Multi-agent planning uses the cooperation and competition of many agents to achieve a given goal.
Emergent behavior such as this is used by evolutionary algorithms and swarm intelligence.
Learning
Machine learning has been central to AI research from the beginning. Unsupervised learning is the
ability to find patterns in a stream of input. Supervised learning includes both classification and
numerical regression. Classification is used to determine what category something belongs in, after
seeing a number of examples of things from several categories. Regression takes a set of numerical
input/output examples and attempts to discover a continuous function that would generate the outputs
from the inputs. In reinforcement learning the agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for
bad ones. These can be analyzed in terms of decision theory, using concepts like utility. The
mathematical analysis of machine learning algorithms and their performance is a branch of theoretical
computer science known as computational learning theory.
Natural language processing

ASIMO uses sensors and intelligent algorithms to avoid obstacles and navigate stairs.
Main article: Natural language processing
Natural language processing gives machines the ability to read and understand the languages that
humans speak. Many researchers hope that a sufficiently powerful natural language processing system
would be able to acquire knowledge on its own, by reading the existing text available over the internet.
Some straightforward applications of natural language processing include information retrieval (or text
mining) and machine translation.
Motion and manipulation
The field of robotics is closely related to AI. Intelligence is required for robots to be able to handle such
tasks as object manipulation and navigation, with sub-problems of localization (knowing where you
are), mapping (learning what is around you) and motion planning (figuring out how to get there).
Perception

Machine perception is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras, microphones, sonar and
others more exotic) to deduce aspects of the world. Computer vision is the ability to analyze visual
input. A few selected subproblems are speech recognition, facial recognition and object recognition.
Social intelligence

Kismet, a robot with rudimentary social skills

Emotion and social skills play two roles for an intelligent agent. First, it must be able to predict the
actions of others, by understanding their motives and emotional states. (This involves elements of game
theory, decision theory, as well as the ability to model human emotions and the perceptual skills to
detect emotions.) Also, for good human-computer interaction, an intelligent machine also needs to
display emotions. At the very least it must appear polite and sensitive to the humans it interacts with.
At best, it should have normal emotions itself.
Creativity
Main article: Computational creativity
TOPIO, a robot that can play table tennis, developed by TOSY.
A sub-field of AI addresses creativity both theoretically (from a philosophical and psychological
perspective) and practically (via specific implementations of systems that generate outputs that can be
considered creative). A related area of computational research is Artificial Intuition and Artificial
Imagination.
General intelligence
Most researchers hope that their work will eventually be incorporated into a machine with general
intelligence (known as strong AI), combining all the skills above and exceeding human abilities at most
or all of them. A few believe that anthropomorphic features like artificial consciousness or an artificial
brain may be required for such a project.
Many of the problems above are considered AI-complete: to solve one problem, you must solve them
all. For example, even a straightforward, specific task like machine translation requires that the
machine follow the author's argument (reason), know what is being talked about (knowledge), and
faithfully reproduce the author's intention (social intelligence). Machine translation, therefore, is
believed to be AI-complete: it may require strong AI to be done as well as humans can do it.
Approaches
There is no established unifying theory or paradigm that guides AI research. Researchers disagree
about many issues. A few of the most long standing questions that have remained unanswered are
these: should artificial intelligence simulate natural intelligence, by studying psychology or neurology?
Or is human biology as irrelevant to AI research as bird biology is to aeronautical engineering? Can
intelligent behavior be described using simple, elegant principles (such as logic or optimization)? Or
does it necessarily require solving a large number of completely unrelated problems? Can intelligence
be reproduced using high-level symbols, similar to words and ideas? Or does it require "sub-symbolic"
processing?
Cybernetics and brain simulation

There is no consensus on how closely the brain should be simulated.

In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of researchers explored the connection between neurology,
information theory, and cybernetics. Some of them built machines that used electronic networks to
exhibit rudimentary intelligence, such as W. Grey Walter's turtles and the Johns Hopkins Beast. Many
of these researchers gathered for meetings of the Teleological Society at Princeton University and the
Ratio Club in England. By 1960, this approach was largely abandoned, although elements of it would
be revived in the 1980s.
Symbolic
When access to digital computers became possible in the middle 1950s, AI research began to explore
the possibility that human intelligence could be reduced to symbol manipulation. The research was
centered in three institutions: CMU, Stanford and MIT, and each one developed its own style of
research. John Haugeland named these approaches to AI "good old fashioned AI" or "GOFAI".
Cognitive simulation
Economist Herbert Simon and Allen Newell studied human problem solving skills and
attempted to formalize them, and their work laid the foundations of the field of artificial
intelligence, as well as cognitive science, operations research and management science. Their
research team used the results of psychological experiments to develop programs that simulated
the techniques that people used to solve problems. This tradition, centered at Carnegie Mellon
University would eventually culminate in the development of the Soar architecture in the
middle 80s.
Logic based
Unlike Newell and Simon, John McCarthy felt that machines did not need to simulate human
thought, but should instead try to find the essence of abstract reasoning and problem solving,
regardless of whether people used the same algorithms. His laboratory at Stanford (SAIL)
focused on using formal logic to solve a wide variety of problems, including knowledge
representation, planning and learning. Logic was also focus of the work at the University of
Edinburgh and elsewhere in Europe which led to the development of the programming language
Prolog and the science of logic programming.
"Anti-logic" or "scruffy"
Researchers at MIT (such as Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert) found that solving difficult
problems in vision and natural language processing required ad-hoc solutions – they argued that
there was no simple and general principle (like logic) that would capture all the aspects of
intelligent behavior. Roger Schank described their "anti-logic" approaches as "scruffy" (as
opposed to the "neat" paradigms at CMU and Stanford). Commonsense knowledge bases (such
as Doug Lenat's Cyc) are an example of "scruffy" AI, since they must be built by hand, one
complicated concept at a time.
Knowledge based
When computers with large memories became available around 1970, researchers from all three
traditions began to build knowledge into AI applications. This "knowledge revolution" led to
the development and deployment of expert systems (introduced by Edward Feigenbaum), the
first truly successful form of AI software. The knowledge revolution was also driven by the
realization that enormous amounts of knowledge would be required by many simple AI
applications.
Sub-symbolic
During the 1960s, symbolic approaches had achieved great success at simulating high-level thinking in
small demonstration programs. Approaches based on cybernetics or neural networks were abandoned
or pushed into the background. By the 1980s, however, progress in symbolic AI seemed to stall and
many believed that symbolic systems would never be able to imitate all the processes of human
cognition, especially perception, robotics, learning and pattern recognition. A number of researchers
began to look into "sub-symbolic" approaches to specific AI problems.
Bottom-up, embodied, situated, behavior-based or nouvelle AI
Researchers from the related field of robotics, such as Rodney Brooks, rejected symbolic AI
and focused on the basic engineering problems that would allow robots to move and survive.
Their work revived the non-symbolic viewpoint of the early cybernetics researchers of the 50s
and reintroduced the use of control theory in AI. This coincided with the development of the
 embodied mind thesis in the related field of cognitive science: the idea that aspects of the body
(such as movement, perception and visualization) are required for higher intelligence.
Computational Intelligence
Interest in neural networks and "connectionism" was revived by David Rumelhart and others in
the middle 1980s. These and other sub-symbolic approaches, such as fuzzy systems and
evolutionary computation, are now studied collectively by the emerging discipline of
computational intelligence.
Statistical
In the 1990s, AI researchers developed sophisticated mathematical tools to solve specific subproblems.
These tools are truly scientific, in the sense that their results are both measurable and verifiable, and
they have been responsible for many of AI's recent successes. The shared mathematical language has
also permitted a high level of collaboration with more established fields (like mathematics, economics
or operations research). Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig describe this movement as nothing less than a
"revolution" and "the victory of the neats."
Integrating the approaches
Intelligent agent paradigm
An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which
maximizes its chances of success. The simplest intelligent agents are programs that solve
specific problems. The most complicated intelligent agents are rational, thinking humans. he
paradigm gives researchers license to study isolated problems and find solutions that are both
verifiable and useful, without agreeing on one single approach. An agent that solves a specific
problem can use any approach that works — some agents are symbolic and logical, some are
sub-symbolic neural networks and others may use new approaches. The paradigm also gives
researchers a common language to communicate with other fields—such as decision theory and
economics—that also use concepts of abstract agents. The intelligent agent paradigm became
widely accepted during the 1990s.
Agent architectures and cognitive architectures
Researchers have designed systems to build intelligent systems out of interacting intelligent
agents in a multi-agent system. A system with both symbolic and sub-symbolic components is a
hybrid intelligent system, and the study of such systems is artificial intelligence systems
integration. A hierarchical control system provides a bridge between sub-symbolic AI at its
lowest, reactive levels and traditional symbolic AI at its highest levels, where relaxed time
constraints permit planning and world modelling. Rodney Brooks' subsumption architecture
[95]

was an early proposal for such a hierarchical system.

Tools
In the course of 50 years of research, AI has developed a large number of tools to solve the most
difficult problems in computer science. A few of the most general of these methods are discussed
below.
Search and optimization

Many problems in AI can be solved in theory by intelligently searching through many possible
solutions: Reasoning can be reduced to performing a search. For example, logical proof can be viewed
as searching for a path that leads from premises to conclusions, where each step is the application of an
inference rule. Planning algorithms search through trees of goals and subgoals, attempting to find a
path to a target goal, a process called means-ends analysis. Robotics algorithms for moving limbs and
grasping objects use local searches in configuration space. Many learning algorithms use search
algorithms based on optimization.
Simple exhaustive searches are rarely sufficient for most real world problems: the search space (the
number of places to search) quickly grows to astronomical numbers. The result is a search that is too
slow or never completes. The solution, for many problems, is to use "heuristics" or "rules of thumb"
that eliminate choices that are unlikely to lead to the goal (called "pruning the search tree"). Heuristics
supply the program with a "best guess" for what path the solution lies on.
A very different kind of search came to prominence in the 1990s, based on the mathematical theory of
optimization. For many problems, it is possible to begin the search with some form of a guess and then
refine the guess incrementally until no more refinements can be made. These algorithms can be
visualized as blind hill climbing: we begin the search at a random point on the landscape, and then, by
jumps or steps, we keep moving our guess uphill, until we reach the top. Other optimization algorithms
are simulated annealing, beam search and random optimization.
Evolutionary computation uses a form of optimization search. For example, they may begin with a
population of organisms (the guesses) and then allow them to mutate and recombine, selecting only the
fittest to survive each generation (refining the guesses). Forms of evolutionary computation include
swarm intelligence algorithms (such as ant colony or particle swarm optimization) and evolutionary
algorithms (such as genetic algorithms and genetic programming