AI Defined

• Textbook definition:
– AI may be defined as the branch of computer science that Thinking
is concerned with the automation of intelligent behavior
machines or
• Other definitions:
machine
– The exciting new effort to make computers think …
intelligence
machines with minds
– The automation of activities that we associate with human
thinking (e.g., decision-making, learning…)
– The art of creating machines that perform functions that Studying
require intelligence when performed by people cognitive
– The study of mental faculties through the use of faculties
computational models
– A field of study that seeks to explain and emulate
intelligent behavior in terms of computational processes Problem
– The study of how to make programs/computers do things Solving and
that people do better
CS
 Areas of Study
• Computer Science – algorithms, data representations,
programs to test theories
• Psychology – theories of mind, memory, learning,
experiments with human and animal intelligence
• Philosophy – mind/body problem, study of logic
• Linguistics – study of language (syntax, semantics)
• Neurology/Biology – study of the brain (both human
and animal), study of memory, learning
• Engineering – many AI domains are in engineering
disciplines, also AI is often thought of as much as
engineering as it is a science
• Mathematics – many algorithms are mathematical in
nature (neural networks, statistical approaches)
 What is Intelligence?
• Is there a “holistic” definition for intelligence?
• We might list elements of intelligence:
– understanding, reasoning, problem solving, learning, common
sense, generalizing, inference, analogy, recall, intuition,
emotion, self-awareness
• Which of these are necessary for intelligence? Which
are sufficient?
• Recall the textbook’s definition for AI:
– AI may be defined as the branch of computer science that
is concerned with the automation of intelligent behavior
• How does intelligent behavior differ from
intelligence? Should we care?
 Physical Symbol System Hypothesis
• A Physical Symbol System (PSS) consists of
– symbols (patterns)
– expressions (legal combinations of symbols)
– processes (to manipulate symbols and expressions into new
expressions)
• The PSS Hypothesis states that a PSS has the necessary
and sufficient means for intelligent action
– the hypothesis was first defined by Newell and Simon
– it has been proved that a PSS is Turing computable so that a
computer is a PSS
• If the PSS Hypothesis is true, then it should be possible
to program a computer to produce intelligent actions
– this is the (or a) goal of AI
• If the PSS Hypothesis is not true, what are the
consequences for AI?
 Turing Test
• Mathematician Alan • If the interrogator cannot
Turing devised a test for tell which is the human
defining artificial and which is the
intelligence: computer, then the
– an interrogator poses computer passes the
questions to two entities, a Turing Test and should be
human and a computer considered intelligent
– Turing first called this the
Imitation game but has
since been renamed the
Turing Test – a test for
machine intelligence
 More on the TT
• Is this a useful test?
– consider the Eliza program (see the next slide)
• does it pass the Turing Test? if so, is it intelligent?
• Even though other programs can now pass the Turing
Test, Eliza points out a truth
– passing the Turing Test does not necessarily imply
intelligence
– most AI programs are shallow, they recognize “syntax” but
not “semantics”
– Nils Nilsson points out the problem with the PSS Hypothesis
and the TT (also reflected by Eliza and other programs):
• there is no symbol grounding – that is, the symbols of a PSS are
merely symbols to be manipulated based on rules, the computer (or
the PSS) has no understanding of what those symbols represent and
therefore no understanding of what conclusions might be drawn
 Eliza
• Person: Men are all alike.
• Eliza: In what way?
• Person: They’re always bugging
us about something or other. • Eliza consists of a series of rules
• Eliza: Can you think of a specific
example? (if-then statements)
• Person: Well, my boyfriend made – sample syntactic manipulations:
me come here.
• <X> me <Y>  <X> you <Y>?
• Eliza: You’re boyfriend made you
come here? • I like <Y>  Why do you like
• Person: He says I’m depressed <Y>?
much of the time. • <X> are like <Y>  In what way?
• Eliza: I am sorry to hear you are
depressed. • <X> {mother | father | brother |
• Person: It is true, I am unhappy. sister}  Tell me more about your
• Eliza: Do you think coming here family
will help you not to be unhappy? • <X>  Can you think of a specific
• Person: I need some help, that example?
much seems certain.
• Eliza: What would it mean to you • Eliza had no understanding of the
if you got some help? text input or its own responses
• Person: Perhaps I could learn to
get along with my mother. – try a non-sensical sentence, you will
• Eliza: Tell me more about your get a non-sensical response!
family.
 The Chinese Room Problem
• You are in a room with a book that contains pages of
Chinese symbols
– your job is to retrieve a question, written in Chinese on a piece
of paper passed into the room, look up the associated response
in the book, write down that response on a piece of paper and
pass that paper out of the room

Question (Chinese)

Storage Book of Chinese Symbols

You
 Chinese Room Continued
• The room is analogous to a computer:
– you = central processing unit
– book = program
– conveyor belt = Input/Output
– storage = memory/disk
• What do the symbols mean? Do you understand them?
– if you do not understand the Chinese symbols, can we say that
the computer understands the symbols it uses (ASCII, binary,
instructions, input, output?)
• What we see here is that a computer is a symbol
manipulating device – it follows rules (a program and
the machine’s microcode) but does not understand what
it is doing
– can there be intelligence without understanding?
– for instance, do you understand the symbols that you
manipulate (a red light for instance) or do you merely respond
to your input?
 The Consequence
• Since the Chinese Room Problem points out that a
computer probably does not understand the symbols,
should this concern us?
• Can we program a computer to be intelligent?
– how important is semantics
– that is, can we somehow ground the symbols to meaningful
information in the computer?
• Strong AI vs. Weak AI: the difference between
semantic-based programs and syntactic-based programs
– or, the difference between simulating intelligence and
performing in an intelligent way
– in the former, we try to capture intelligence in the machine
– in the latter, we merely program the computer with knowledge
and processes to apply that knowledge in a way similar to how
humans might apply the knowledge
 What does AI do?
• To some, AI means different things
• But traditionally, AI is an effort to solve problems by
applying knowledge and so we must answer these questions:
– how do we represent knowledge
– how do we apply that knowledge
• We will examine problems such as:
– diagnosis and other forms of reasoning
– planning, design and decision making
– learning
– recognition and perception
– understanding
• often, the problems that we try to solve in AI require a lot of human
knowledge – we may need access to human experts to acquire that
knowledge and codify it
 Representations
• Consider the “mutilated chess board”
– how can you place dominoes on the mutilated chess
board so that all squares are covered?
– should we represent the chessboard visually as shown to
the right? use a 2-D array? or merely represent it like
this: 32 black squares, 30 white squares?
• Consider the game of tic-tac-toe
– data structure: 1-D array of 9 elements or 3x3 array?
– knowledge:
• we could store for each board configuration, the best move to take, this would
require 3^9 different board configurations! (table look-up approach)
• we could store rules that say, for each turn (1-9) what type of move should be
made (rule-based approach)
• we could derive a function which evaluates a board configuration for its
“goodness” and select a move based on which one is judged best (heuristic
approach)
– which approach is the most efficient?
 Table-Lookup vs. Reasoning
• In our tic-tac-toe example, we see one solution is to
have a table of all best moves
– this is impractical for most problems, consider chess or a
program like Eliza
• Instead, we want to opt for a solution that relies on
knowledge and reasoning over that knowledge
– in chess, we define rules that encapsulate chess strategies
– in diagnosis, we implement reasoning by means of “chaining”
rules that map symptoms to diseases
– in planning, we represent goals by enumerating the tasks
needed to accomplish those goals and implement reasoning by
“chaining” through the rules from goals to tasks to subtasks
 Representational Techniques
• Predicate calculus
– known items are predicates
– implication rules are used for reasoning
• Production systems
– knowledge is represented as if-then rules
– use forward or backward chaining to reason
• Graph theory
– knowledge is stored as nodes and links in a graph (or tree)
– search the graph/tree for a solution
• Semantic structures
– store knowledge as categories, instances, and their attributes
– semantic networks are a visual form, frames are the precursor of OOPLs
• Statistical/mathematical approaches
– primarily added to one of the above techniques to portray uncertainty
• Subsymbolic approaches (neural networks)
 Problem Areas
• Diagnosis
• Understanding/Recognition
– often tied in with perception
• Natural Language Processing
• Planning/design & decision making
• Game playing
• Automated theorem proving
• Learning (symbolic, subsymbolic, evolutionary)
• Agents and communication
• Ontologies and web applications
• Robotics (which combines several of the above)