Introduction – Chapter 1

AI is one of the newest fields in science and engineering

 AI Definition
• The exciting new effort to make computers thinks … machine with
minds, in the full and literal sense” (Haugeland 1985)
• The automation of activities that we associate with human thinking,
activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning,…
(Bellman, 1978)

Think Like Humans

 AI Definition
• “The art of creating machines that perform functions that require
intelligence when performed by people” (Kurzweil, 1990)
• “The study of how to make computers do things at which, at the
moment, people do better”, (Rich and Knight, 1991)

Act Like Humans

 AI Definition
• “The study of mental faculties through the use of computational
models”,(Charniak et al. 1985)
• “The study of the computations that make it possible to perceive,
reason and act”,(Winston, 1992)

Think Rationally
 AI Definition
• “Computational Intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent
agents” (Poole et al, 1998)
• “AI….is concerned with intelligent behavior in artifact”, (Nilsson,
1998)

Act Rationally
 How to Achieve AI?
Acting
humanly

Thinking
humanly AI Thinking
rationally

Acting
rationally

6
 Acting Humanly: The Turing Test
• The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing TURING
TEST (1950),
• A computer passes the test
• if a human interrogator, after posing some written
questions, cannot tell whether the written responses
come from a person or from a computer.

Alan Turing
❖ To be intelligent, a program should simply act like a 1912-1954
human

CSC 361 Artificial Intelligence 7

 Acting Humanly
• To pass the Turing test, the computer/robot needs:
– Natural language processing to communicate successfully.

– Knowledge representation to store what it knows or hears.

– Automated reasoning to answer questions and draw conclusions using stored

information.
– Machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate
patterns.

– These are the main branches of AI.

8
Acting Humanly: The Turing Test
Turing test+ physical interaction => Total
Turing Test
- Recognize objects and gestures
- Move objects

❖ To be intelligent, a program should simply

act like a human
Alan Turing
1912-1954

9
 Acting Humanly – for Total Turing
• To pass the Turing test, the computer/robot needs:
– Natural language processing to communicate successfully.
– Knowledge representation to store what it knows or hears.
– Automated reasoning to answer questions and draw conclusions using stored
information.
– Machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate
patterns.
– Computer vision to perceive objects. (Total Turing test)
– Robotics to manipulate objects and move. (Total Turing test)

⮚ These are the main branches of AI.

 Thinking Humanly
The cognitive modeling approach
• Real intelligence requires thinking 🡪 think like a human !
• First, we should know how a human think
– Introspect ones thoughts: Trying to catch our own thoughts
– Physiological experiment: observing a person in action
– Brain imaging: observing the brain in action
• Then, we can build programs and models that think like humans
– Resulted in the field of cognitive science: a merger between AI and
psychology.

11
 Problems with Imitating Humans
• The human thinking process is difficult to understand: how
does the mind raises from the brain ? Think also about
unconscious tasks such as vision and speech
understanding.
• Real cognitive science, is based on experimental
investigation of actual humans or animals.
• Humans are not perfect ! We make a lot of systemic
mistakes:

12
 Thinking Rationally
• Instead of thinking like a human think rationally.
• Find out how correct thinking must proceed: the laws of thought.
• Aristotle syllogism: “Socrates is a man; all men are mortal,
therefore Socrates is mortal.”
• This initiated logic a traditional and important branch of
mathematics and computer science.
• Problem:
– First, it is not easy to take informal knowledge and state it in the formal
terms required by logical notation, particularly when the knowledge is
less than 100% certain.
– Second, there is a big difference between solving a problem “in
principle” and solving it in practice.
13
 Acting Rationally
• Agent: something that acts
• Computer Agent:
– operate autonomously,
– perceive their environment,
– persist over a prolonged time period,
– adapt to change, and
– create and pursue goals.
• Rational agent: acts as to achieve the best outcome or when there is
uncertainty, the best expected outcome.
• Logical thinking is only one aspect of appropriate behavior: reactions
like getting your hand out of a hot place is not the result of a careful deliberation,
yet it is clearly rational.
• Advantages (rational-agent approach):
– more general than “thinking rationally” and more
– Mathematically principled; proven to achieve rationality unlike human behavior or
thought
14
 Acting Rationally

This is how birds fly Humans tried to mimic This is how we finally
birds for centuries achieved “artificial flight”

15
 Relations to Other Fields
• Philosophy
– Logic, methods of reasoning and rationality.
• Mathematics
– Formal representation and proof, algorithms, computation, (un)decidability,
(in)tractability, probability.
• Economics
– utility, decision theory (decide under uncertainty)
• Neuroscience
– neurons as information processing units.
• Psychology/Cognitive Science
– how do people behave, perceive, process information, represent knowledge
• Computer engineering
– building fast computers
• Control theory
– design systems that maximize an objective function over time
• Linguistics
– knowledge representation, grammar
16
 AI History
• Gestation of AI (1934 - 1955)
– In 1943, proposed a binary-based model of neurons
– Any computable function can be modeled by a set of neurons
– A serious attempt to model brain
– 1950, Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence ”: turing test, reinforcement learning and
machine learning
• The Inception of AI (1956)
– Dartmouth meeting to study AI
– an AI program ”Logic Theorist” to prove many theorems
• Early Enthusiasm and great Expectation (1952-1969)
– General Problem Solver imitates the human way of thinking
– LISP (AI programming language) was defined
– 1965, Robinson discovered the resolution method – logical reasoning
• AI Winter (1966-1973)
– Computational intractability of many AI problems
– Neural Network starts to disappear
 AI History
• Knowledge-based systems (1969-1979)
– Use domain knowledge to allow for stronger reasoning
• Becomes an Industry (1980-now)
– Digital Equipment Corporation selling R1 “expert sytem”
– From few million to billions in 8 years
• The return of neural network (1986-now)
– With the back-propagation algorithm
• AI adopts scientific method (1987-now)
– More common to base theorems on pervious ones or rigorous evidence rather than
intuition
– Speech recognition and HMM
• Emergence of intelligent agent (1995-now)
– search engines, recommender systems,….
• Availability of very large data sets (2001 – now)
– Worry more about the data
 The State of the Art
• Robotics Vehicle: DARPA Challenge
• Speech Recognition : United Airlines
• Autonomous Planning and Scheduling
– Remote Agent: Plan and control spacecraft
– MAPGEN: daily planning of operations on NASA’s exploration Rover
• Game Playing: IBM Deep Blue
• Spam Fighting
• Logistic Planning
– DART – Dynamic Analysis and Replacing Tool
– Gulf War 1991
– To plan the logistic for transportation of 50k vehicles, cargo and people
– Generated in hour a plan that could take weeks
• Robotics
• Machine Translation: Statistical models
 Summary
• This course is concerned with creating rational agents: artificial
rationality.
• AI has passed the era of infancy and is now attacking real life,
complex problems, and it is succeeding in many of them.
• The history of AI has had a turbulent history with many ups and
downs, phenomenal successes and deep disappointments
resulting in fund cutbacks and economic losses.
• AI has flourished in the last two decades and it the researchers
mentality shifted towards a rigorous scientific methodology:
Firm theoretical basis & Serious experiments

20