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DEBRE TABOR UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF TECHNOLOGY
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Artificial Intelligence (CoSc4142)

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Chapter Four

Knowledge and Reasoning

 Knowledge: What and
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Why?
 Knowledge includes facts about the real world entities and the
relationship between them.

Why Knowledge is important?

 We are living in complex environment where there are:
• Many actors, prosumers, strong competitors, and high turn over
 It enables to:
• Automate reasoning , Discover new facts, Deduce new facts that
follow from the KB, and Answer users queries
• Make quality decisions - select courses of actions, etc.
 Knowledge Base Agent
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 Knowledge base agent is an agent that perform action using the

knowledge it has and reason about their action using its inference
procedure.
 Consists of two parts:
 knowledge base: contains the domain-specific knowledge that
the agent has of its environment. This can consist of facts, but
also rules that describe the structure of the environment.

Inference engine: It consists of algorithms that take the contents
of the knowledge base and infer (i.e. deduce) new knowledge
 Con’t…
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 Knowledge base is a set of representation of facts and

their relation ships called rules about the world
 Each fact/rules are called sentences which is represented
using a language called knowledge representation
 Con’t…
 Declarative approach to building an agent (or other system):
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 Tell it what it needs to know (Knowledge base)

 Ask what it knows
 Answers should follow from the KB

 The agent must be able to:

 Represent states of the world, actions, etc.
 Incorporate new percepts (facts and rules)
 Deduce hidden properties of the world
 Deduce appropriate actions
 Update internal representations of the world
 Logical Agents
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 Logic is the study of principles of reasoning and

arguments towards the truth of a given conclusion given
premises.
 Logic in AI is the key idea for KB design, KB
representation and inferencing (reasoning).
 Logic is formal languages use for representing
information so that conclusions can be drawn.
 Logic is the systematic study of the general conditions of
 Con’t…
 A logic consists of a syntax and some semantics.
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 The syntax defines what an allowable sentence is in the language,

whereas the semantics defines the meaning of the sentences.
 There are many different logics. For example, integer arithmetic is a
logic. The syntax of integer arithmetic states that the following are all
legal sentences:
1+4=x
x–4>2
x2 – 2x = 0
 whereas the following are illegal sentences:
1+*2=
x2 + y > {}
 Entailment
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 The idea that a sentence follows logically from another

sentence.
 α╞ β (i.e, the sentence α entails the sentence β; (or)
the sentence β logically follows from sentence α)
 The formal definition of entailment is this: α ╞ β if and
only if, in every model in which α is true, β is also true.

It can be written as, α ╞ β if and only if m(α) = m

 Models
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 The semantics of a logic define the truth (or otherwise) of

sentences in possible worlds.
 A world is an assignment of values to variables.

For example: we can say that the integer arithmetic

sentence “x + y = 4” is true in the world where x = 2 and
y = 2.
- Logicians often refer to models rather than worlds, but
the meaning is the same: an assignment of values to
 Con’t…
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For example: The model {x = 2, y = 2} is a model of the

sentence

“x + y = 4”.
 In addition, the model {x = 1, y = 3} is also a model of
the sentence “x + y = 4”. In fact, because there are an
infinite number of integers, there are an infinite number
of models of this sentence.
 Propositional(Boolean) Logic
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 Proposition is statement which is either true or false

but not both at any time.
 A statement is a sentence which is either true or false.
 PL uses declarative sentences only
 PL doesn’t involve quantifiers.
 Not all sentences are statement (interrogatives,
imperatives and exclamatory)
 Con’t…
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 Preposition can be conditional or unconditional

 Examples
 Socrates is mortal (unconditional)
 If the winter is severe, students will not succeed.

(conditional)
 All are the same if their color is black (conditional)

 In propositional logic, symbols represent the whole

preposition.
 Examples:
 M = Socrates is mortal
 W = winter is sever
 Con’t…
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 Preposition symbols can be combined using

Boolean connectives to generate new
preposition with complex meaning
 Symbols involved in PL:
 Logical constants (TRUE and FALSE)
 Preposition symbols (also called atomic symbols) like

M, W, S
 Logical connectives

 (negation),
 (conjunction),
 (disjunction),
 (bi-implication or equivalence),
 Con’t…
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 A simple language useful for showing key ideas and

definitions
 User defines a set of propositional symbols, like P and Q.
 User defines the semantics of each propositional
symbol:
 P means “It is hot”
 Q means “It is humid”
 R means “It is raining”
 Con’t…
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 A sentence (well formed formula) is defined as

follows:
 A symbol is a sentence
 If S is a sentence, then S is a sentence
 If S is a sentence, then (S) is a sentence
 If S and T are sentences, then (S  T), (S  T), (S 
T), and (S ↔ T) are sentences
 A sentence results from a finite number of
 Examples of PL sentences
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 (P  Q)  R
“If it is hot and humid, then it is raining”
 Q  P, “If it is humid, then it is hot”
 Q , “It is humid.”
 A better way:
Ho = “It is hot”

Hu = “It is humid”
 Some terms
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 The meaning or semantics of a sentence determines its

interpretation.
 Given the truth values of all symbols in a sentence, it can
be “evaluated” to determine its truth value (True or
False).
 A model for a KB is a “possible world” (assignment of
truth values to propositional symbols) in which each
 Truth tables I
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 Truth tables II
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 Knowledge Representation and
reasoning
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 Knowledge Representation: express knowledge

explicitly in a computer-tractable way such that the agent
can reason out.
 Parts of KR language:
 Syntax of a language: describes the possible
configuration to form sentences.
E.g. if x & y denote numbers, then x > y is a sentence
about numbers
 Con’t…
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 Semantics: determines the facts in the world to which the

sentences refer.
E.g. x > y is false when y is greater than x and true
otherwise

Reasoning: is the process of constructing new sentences from

existing facts in the KB.
 Proper reasoning ensures that the new configuration
represent facts that actually follow from the facts in the KB.
 Knowledge-based Systems and
Knowledge
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What is a knowledge-based system?

 A system which is built around a knowledge
base. i.e. a collection of knowledge, taken from a
human, and stored in such a way that the system
can reason with it.

What is knowledge?
 Knowledge is the sort of information that people
 Con’t...
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 Knowledge includes:
 facts, concepts, procedures, models, heuristics,
examples.
 Knowledge may be:
 specific or general
 exact or fuzzy
 procedural or declarative
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