Chapter four

Knowledge and Reasoning

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Introduction
Intelligent agents need knowledge about the world in order to reach a good
decisions making.
In the previous chapter, we showed that an agent that has goals and searches
for solutions to the goals can do better than one that just reacts to its
environment. We focused mainly on the question of how to carry out the
search, leaving aside the question of general methods for describing states and
actions.
In this chapter, we extend the capabilities of our agents by endowing them
with the capacity for general logical reasoning. A logical, knowledge-based agent
begins with some knowledge of the world and of its own actions. It uses logical
reasoning to maintain a description of the world as new percepts arrive, and to
deduce a course of action that will achieve its goals.
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Cont’d
The knowledge-based approach is a particularly powerful way of constructing
an agent program. It aims to implement a view of agents in which they can be
seen as knowing about their world, and reasoning about their possible courses
of action.
Knowledge-based agents are able to accept new tasks in the form of explicitly
described goals; they can achieve competence quickly by being told or learning
new knowledge about the environment; and they can adapt to changes in the
environment by updating the relevant knowledge. A knowledge-based agent
needs to know many things: the current state of the world; how to infer unseen
properties of the world from percepts; how the world evolves over time; what it
wants to achieve; and what its own actions do in various circumstances.

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A Knowledge-Based Agent

The central component of a knowledge-based agent is its knowledge base, or

KB. Informally, a knowledge base is a set of representations of facts about the
world. Each individual representation is called a sentence. (Here "sentence" is
used as a technical term. It is related to the sentences of English and other
natural languages, but is not identical.) The sentences are expressed in a
language called a knowledge representation language.
The main idea is taking the world to be one way and not another.
If KB is true in the real world, then any sentence  derived from KB by a sound
inference procedure is also true in the real world.

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What is representation?

It is a symbol that stands for things in the world.

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Propositional Logic

Prepositional logic serves to illustrate many of the concepts of logic just as well as first-order logic.
We will describe its syntax, semantics, and associated inference procedures.
Syntax
The syntax of prepositional logic is simple. The symbols of prepositional logic are the logical
constants True and False, proposition symbols such as P and Q, the logical connectives A, V, &, =>,
and -i, and parentheses, (). All sentences are made by putting these symbols together using the
following rules:
The logical constants True and False are sentences by themselves.
A prepositional symbol such as P or Q is a sentence by itself.
Wrapping parentheses around a sentence yields a sentence, for example, (P A Q).
A sentence can be formed by combining simpler sentences with one of the five logical connectives:

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Cont’d
 A (and). A sentence whose main connective is A, such as P A (Q V R), is called a conjunction
(logic); its parts are the conjuncts. (The A looks like an "A" for "And.")
V (or). A sentence using V, such as A V (P A Q), is a disjunction of the disjuncts A and (P A Q).
(Historically, the V comes from the Latin "vel," which means "or." For most people, it is easier to
remember as an upside-down and.)
=>• (implies). A sentence such as (PA Q) =>• R is called an implication (or conditional). Its
premise or antecedent is P A Q, and its conclusion or consequent is R. Implications are also
known as rules or if-then statements.
<=> (equivalent). The sentence (P A Q) <=> (Q A P) is an equivalence (also called a
biconditional).
 (not). A sentence such as P is called the negation of P. All the other connectives combine
two sentences into one;  is the only connective that operates on a single sentence.

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Truth Table for the five logical connectives.

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Predicate (First-Order) Logic
First-order logic is used to model the world in terms of
◦ objects which are things with individual identities

e.g., individual students, lecturers, companies, cars,

◦ properties of objects that distinguish them from other objects

e.g., mortal, blue, oval, even, large,

◦ classes of objects (often defined by properties)

e.g., human, mammal, machine,

◦ relations that hold among objects

e.g., brother of, bigger than, outside, part of, has color, occurs after, owns, a member of, ...
◦ functions which are a subset of the relations in which there is only one ``value'' for any given ``input''.

e.g., father of, best friend, second half, one more than.

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Knowledge Representation
What is Knowledge?
The data is collection of facts. The information is organized as data and facts about the task
domain. Data, information, and past experience combined together are termed as knowledge.
Components of Knowledge Base
The knowledge base of expert systems is a store of both, factual and heuristic knowledge.
Factual Knowledge – It is the information widely accepted by the Knowledge Engineers and
scholars in the task domain.
Heuristic Knowledge – It is about practice, accurate judgment, one’s ability of evaluation, and
guessing.

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What is a Knowledge Representation?

Knowledge representation: - is the symbolic encoding of propositions believed (by some agent).
Knowledge-representation is the field of artificial intelligence that focuses on designing
computer representations that capture information about the world that can be used to solve
complex problems.
It is the method used to organize and formalize the knowledge in the knowledge base. It is in
the form of IF-THEN-ELSE rules.
For example, talking to experts in terms of business rules rather than code, minimizes the
semantic gap between users and developers and makes development of complex systems more
practical.
According to, Randall Davis, Howard Shrobe, Peter Szolovits, MIT, there are five distinct roles
to analyze a knowledge representation framework

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Cont’d
1. A knowledge representation is most fundamentally a surrogate, a substitute for the thing itself, used to
enable an entity to determine consequences by reasoning about the world.
A knowledge representation (KR) is most fundamentally a surrogate, a substitute for the thing itself,
used to enable an entity to determine consequences by thinking rather than acting, i.e., by reasoning
about the world rather than taking action in it.
2. It is a set of ontological commitments, i.e., an answer to the question: In what terms should I think
about the world?.
3. It is a fragmentary (incomplete) theory of intelligent reasoning, expressed in terms of three
components:
the representation's fundamental conception (start) of intelligent reasoning;
the set of inferences the representation sanctions;
the set of inferences it recommends.

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Cont’d
4. It is a medium for pragmatically (logically) efficient computation, i.e., the computational
environment in which reasoning is accomplished.
One contribution to this pragmatic efficiency is supplied by the guidance a representation
provides for organizing information so as to facilitate making the recommended inferences.
5. It is a medium of human expression, i.e., a language in which we say things about the world.
Finally, knowledge representations are also the means by which we express things about the
world, the medium of expression and communication in which we tell the machine (and perhaps
one another) about the world. This role for representations is inevitable so long as we need to
tell the machine (or other people) about the world, and so long as we do so by creating and
communicating representations

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Cont’d
If A represents B, then A stands for B and is usually more easily accessible than B.
We are interested in symbolic representations.
Symbolic representations of propositions or statements that are believed by some agent.

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What is Reasoning?

Reasoning: It is the set of processes that enables us to provide basis for judgments, making
decisions, and prediction in order to derive new ones.
There are broadly two types:
Inductive Reasoning (It conducts specific observations to makes broad general statements. Even
if all of the premises are true in a statement, inductive reasoning allows for the conclusion to be
false. For example: “Abebe is a teacher. All teachers are intellectual (thinker). Therefore, Abebe is
intellectual (thinker).”).
Deductive Reasoning (It starts with a general statement and examines the possibilities to reach a
specific, logical conclusion. If something is true of a class of things in general, it is also true for all
members of that class. For example:"All women of age above 58 years are grandmothers. Gadise
is 58 years. Therefore, Gadise is a grandmother.").

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Cont’d
Not interested (in the course) in the philosophical dimension
Reasoning is the use of symbolic representations of some statements in order to derive new
ones.
While statements are abstract objects, their representations are concrete objects and can be
easily manipulated.
Reasoning can be as easy as mechanical symbol manipulation.
Reasoning should scale well: we need efficient reasoning algorithms.
“When the system is required to do something that it has not been explicitly told how to do, it
must reason - it must figure out what it needs to know from what it already knows. For instance,
suppose an information retrieval program 'knows' only that Robins are birds and that all birds
have wings.

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Cont’d
 Keep in mind that for a system to know these facts means only that it contains data structures
and procedures that would allow it to answer the questions:
◦ Are Robins birds? Yes
◦ Do all birds have wings? Yes
If we then ask it, Do robins have wings? the program must reason to answer the query. In
problems of any complexity, the ability to do this becomes increasingly important. The system
must be able to deduce and verify a multitude of new facts beyond those it has been told
explicitly.”
Reading Assignment
1. Bayesian reasoning
2. Probabilistic reasoning
3. Temporal reasoning

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Knowledge Base

It contains domain-specific and high-quality knowledge.

Knowledge is required to exhibit intelligence. The success of any
expert systems majorly depends upon the collection of highly
accurate and precise knowledge.
The expert systems are the computer applications developed to
solve complex problems in a particular domain, at the level of extra-
ordinary human intelligence and expertise.

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 Characteristics of Expert Systems

 High performance
 Understandable
 Reliable
 Highly responsive
 The expert systems are capable of:
Advising, Instructing and assisting human in decision making, Demonstrating, Deriving a solution, Diagnosing,
Explaining, Interpreting input, Predicting results, Justifying the conclusion and Suggesting alternative options to a
problem
 They are incapable of:
Substituting human decision makers, Possessing human capabilities, Producing accurate output for inadequate
knowledge base and Refining their own knowledge

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Thank You

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