Chapter 1:

Introduction to Artificial
Intelligence (AI)
•Introduction to AI
•The Foundations of AI
•History of AI
•Approaches to AI
•State of the Art

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Assessments :
• Assignment:15%
• Mid term: 25%
• Final exam : 40%
• Lab work: 20%
• Resource
– http://cs.tju.edu.cn/faculties/zyfeng/Course/AI/
– http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/
– http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall01/c
s302/index.html
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1. Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern
Approach (second edition) Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey.
2. Philip C. Jackson, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (2nd edition),
USA, Dover Publications, 1985
3. Artificial intelligence
4. Ieee intelligent systems
5. Journal of artificial intelligence research
6. Computational intelligence
7. Journal of intelligent information systems
8. Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems

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 What is AI?
• There is no single definition, but several
approaches, that Russell-Norvig summarize in
four main ones.
• These approaches follow different points of
view.
• Their influences are diverse (Philosophy,
Mathematics, Psychology, Biology...).
• Their fields of application are ample and
interrelated.

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Views of AI fall into four categories:

Thinking humanly Thinking rationally

Acting humanly Acting rationally

The textbook advocates "acting rationally"

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 Approaches to AI
• Systems that act like humans
– The study of how to obtain that computers perform
tasks at which, at the moment, people are better (Rich
and Knight, 1991)
• Systems that think like humans
– The effort to make computers think... machines with
minds in the full and literal sense (Haugeland, 1985)
• Systems that think rationally
– The study of the mental faculties through the study of
computational models (Charniak and McDermott,
1985)
• Systems that act rationally
– The effort to explain and emulate the intelligent
behavior in terms of computational processes
(Shalkoff, 1990)
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 Other approaches to AI
• Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence
(GOFAI) (Douglas Lenat: Cyc)
– Cramming a computer full of knowledge about the real
world and methods to manipulate it
– Intelligence intimately tied up with having and being able
to use knowledge
– “It’s worth to go to school”
– Robotic insects example
• Legs controlled by a central computer that has a detailed 3D
map of the terrain and knows all the relevant laws of physics
and strategies

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 Other approaches to AI
• Learning through experience (Rodney
Brooks: Cog, Kismet)
– Machines that experience the world in much the
way human beings do
– “You can learn stuff on your own”
– Robotic insects example
• Each leg containing a small circuit that tells it about
basic movements
• All local computation physically coupled through the
body, with gait emerging spontaneously from circuits’
interaction

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• Turing (1950) "Computing machinery and intelligence":
• "Can machines think?"  "Can machines behave intelligently?"
• Operational test for intelligent behavior: the Imitation Game

• Robots are giving interview for 5 minutes, a machine might have a

30% chance of fooling a lay person.
• Anticipated all major arguments against AI in following 50 years
• Suggested major components of AI: knowledge, reasoning,
language understanding, learning
•

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• 1960s "cognitive revolution": information-processing
psychology

• Requires scientific theories of internal activities of the brain

• -- How to validate? Requires
1) Predicting and testing behavior of human subjects (top-
down) or
2) Direct identification from neurological data (bottom-up)

• Both approaches (roughly, Cognitive Science and

Cognitive Neuroscience) are now distinct from AI

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• Aristotle: what are correct arguments/thought processes?

• Several Greek schools developed various forms of logic:

notation and rules of derivation for thoughts; may or may
not have proceeded to the idea of mechanization

• Direct line through mathematics and philosophy to

modern AI

• Problems:
1. Not all intelligent behavior is mediated by logical
deliberation
2. What is the purpose of thinking? What thoughts
should I have?
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• Rational behavior: doing the right thing

• The right thing: that which is expected to maximize goal

achievement, given the available information

• Doesn't necessarily involve thinking – e.g., blinking

reflex – but thinking should be in the service of rational
action

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• A rational agent is an agent that has clear preferences,
models uncertainty via expected values of variables or
functions of variables, and always chooses to perform the
action with the optimal expected outcome for itself from
among all feasible solutions.

• An agent is an entity that perceives and acts

• This course is about designing rational agents

• Abstractly, an agent is a function from percept histories to actions:

[f: P*  A]

• For any given class of environments and tasks, we seek the agent (or
class of agents) with the best performance

• Caveat: computational limitations make perfect rationality unachievable

 design best program for given machine resources
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• Philosophy Logic, methods of reasoning, mind as
physical system foundations of learning,
language, rationality
• Mathematics Formal representation and proof
algorithms, computation, (un)decidability,
(in)tractability, probability
• Economics utility, decision theory
• Neuroscience physical substrate for mental activity
• Psychology phenomena of perception and motor
control, experimental techniques
• Computer building fast computers engineering
• Control theory design systems that maximize an objective
function over time
• Linguistics knowledge representation, grammar
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• 1943 McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain
• 1950 Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
• 1956 Dartmouth meeting: "Artificial Intelligence" adopted
• 1952—69 Look, Ma, no hands!
• 1950s Early AI programs, including Samuel's checkers
program, Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist,
Gelernter's Geometry Engine
• 1965 Robinson's complete algorithm for logical reasoning
• 1966—73 AI discovers computational complexity
Neural network research almost disappears
• 1969—79 Early development of knowledge-based systems
• 1980-- AI becomes an industry
• 1986-- Neural networks return to popularity
• 1987-- AI becomes a science
• 1995-- The emergence of intelligent agents

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• State of the art (sometimes cutting edge) refers to the highest level
of general development, as of a device, technique, or scientific
field achieved at a particular time. It also refers to such a level of
development reached at any particular time as a result of the
common methodologies employed at the time.

• Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov
in 1997

• Proved a mathematical conjecture (Robbins conjecture) unsolved for

decades

• No hands across America (driving autonomously 98% of the time from

Pittsburgh to San Diego)

• During the 1991 Gulf War, US forces deployed an AI logistics planning

and scheduling program that involved up to 50,000 vehicles, cargo, and
people

• NASA's on-board autonomous planning program controlled the

scheduling of operations for a spacecraft

• Proverb solves crosswordchapter1:

puzzles better than most humans
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 Consider what might be involved in
building a “smart” computer….

• What are the “components” that might be useful?

– Fast hardware?
– Foolproof software?
– Chess-playing at grandmaster level?
– Speech interaction?
• speech synthesis
• speech recognition
• speech understanding
– Image recognition and understanding ?
– Learning?
– Planning and decision-making?

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 Can we build hardware as complex as the
brain?
• How complicated is our brain?
– a neuron, or nerve cell, is the basic information processing unit
– estimated to be on the order of 10 12 neurons in a human brain
– many more synapses (10 14) connecting these neurons
– cycle time: 10 -3 seconds (1 millisecond)

• How complex can we make computers?

– 106 or more transistors per CPU
– supercomputer: hundreds of CPUs, 10 9 bits of RAM
– cycle times: order of 10 - 8 seconds

• Conclusion
– YES: in the near future we can have computers with as many basic
processing elements as our brain, but with
• far fewer interconnections (wires or synapses) than the brain
• much faster updates than the brain
– but building hardware is very different from making a computer behave
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 Must an Intelligent System be Foolproof ?
• A “foolproof” system is one that never makes an error:
– Types of possible computer errors
• hardware errors, e.g., memory errors
• software errors, e.g., coding bugs
• “human-like” errors
– Clearly, hardware and software errors are possible in practice
– what about “human-like” errors?

• An intelligent system can make errors and still be intelligent

– humans are not right all of the time
– we learn and adapt from making mistakes
• e.g., consider learning to surf or ski
– we improve by taking risks and falling
– an intelligent system can learn in the same way

• Conclusion:
– NO: intelligent systems will not (and need not) be foolproof

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 Can Computers play Humans at Chess?
• Chess Playing is a classic AI problem
– well-defined problem
– very complex: difficult for humans to play well
3000
2800 Garry Kasparov (current World Champion) Deep Blue
2600
2400 Deep Thought
Points Ratings

2200
Ratings
2000
1800
1600
1400
1200
1966 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1997
• Conclusion: YES: today’s computers can beat even the best
human
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 Can Computers Talk?
• This is known as “speech synthesis”
– translate text to phonetic form
• e.g., “fictitious” -> fik-tish-es
– use pronunciation rules to map phonemes to actual sound
• e.g., “tish” -> sequence of basic audio sounds

• Difficulties
– sounds made by this “lookup” approach sound unnatural
– sounds are not independent
• e.g., “act” and “action”
• modern systems (e.g., at AT&T) can handle this pretty well
– a harder problem is emphasis, emotion, etc
• humans understand what they are saying
• machines don’t: so they sound unnatural

• Conclusion: NO, for complete sentences, but YES for individual

words

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 Can Computers Recognize Speech?
• Speech Recognition:
– mapping sounds from a microphone into a list of
words.
– Hard problem: noise, more than one person talking,
occlusion, speech variability,..
– Even if we recognize each word, we may not
understand its meaning.

• Recognizing single words from a small vocabulary

• systems can do this with high accuracy (order of 99%)
• e.g., directory inquiries
– limited vocabulary (area codes, city names)
– computer tries to recognize you first, if unsuccessful hands you over
to a human operator
– saves millions of dollars a year for the phone companies

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 Recognizing human speech (ctd.)

• Recognizing normal speech is much more difficult

– speech is continuous: where are the boundaries between words?
• e.g., “John’s car has a flat tire”
– large vocabularies
• can be many thousands of possible words
• we can use context to help figure out what someone said
– try telling a waiter in a restaurant:
“I would like some dream and sugar in my coffee”
– background noise, other speakers, accents, colds, etc
– on normal speech, modern systems are only about 60% accurate

• Conclusion: NO, normal speech is too complex to accurately

recognize, but YES for restricted problems
– (e.g., recent software for PC use by IBM, Dragon systems, etc)

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 Can Computers Understand speech?

• Understanding is different to recognition:

– “Time flies like an arrow”
• assume the computer can recognize all the words
• but how could it understand it?
– 1. time passes quickly like an arrow?
– 2. command: time the flies the way an arrow times the flies
– 3. command: only time those flies which are like an arrow
– 4. “time-flies” are fond of arrows
• only 1. makes any sense, but how could a computer figure this
out?
– clearly humans use a lot of implicit commonsense knowledge in
communication

• Conclusion: NO, much of what we say is beyond the

capabilities of a computer to understand at present

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 Can Computers Learn and Adapt ?
• Learning and Adaptation
– consider a computer learning to drive on the freeway
– we could code lots of rules about what to do
– or we could let it drive and steer it back on course when it
heads for the embankment
• systems like this are under development (e.g., Daimler Benz)
• e.g., RALPH at CMU
– in mid 90’s it drove 98% of the way from Pittsburgh to San Diego without
any human assistance

– machine learning allows computers to learn to do things

without explicit programming

• Conclusion: YES, computers can learn and adapt, when

presented with information in the appropriate way
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 Can Computers “see”?
• Recognition v. Understanding (like Speech)
– Recognition and Understanding of Objects in a scene
• look around this room
• you can effortlessly recognize objects
• human brain can map 2d visual image to 3d “map”

• Why is visual recognition a hard problem?

• Conclusion: mostly NO: computers can only “see” certain types

of objects under limited circumstances: but YES for certain
constrained problems (e.g., face recognition)
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 Can Computers plan and make decisions?
• Intelligence
– involves solving problems and making decisions and plans
– e.g., you want to visit your cousin in Boston
• you need to decide on dates, flights
• you need to get to the airport, etc
• involves a sequence of decisions, plans, and actions

• What makes planning hard?

– the world is not predictable:
• your flight is canceled or there’s a backup on the 405
– there are a potentially huge number of details
• do you consider all flights? all dates?
– no: commonsense constrains your solutions
– AI systems are only successful in constrained planning problems

• Conclusion: NO, real-world planning and decision-making is still

beyond the capabilities of modern computers
– exception: very well-defined, constrained problems: mission planning for
satellites.

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Summary of State of AI Systems in Practice
• Speech synthesis, recognition and understanding
– very useful for limited vocabulary applications
– unconstrained speech understanding is still too hard
• Computer vision
– works for constrained problems (hand-written zip-codes)
– understanding real-world, natural scenes is still too hard
• Learning
– adaptive systems are used in many applications: have their
limits
• Planning and Reasoning
– only works for constrained problems: e.g., chess
– real-world is too complex for general systems

• Overall:
– many components of intelligent systems are “doable”
– there are many interesting research problems remaining

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 Intelligent Systems in Your Everyday Life
• Post Office
– automatic address recognition and sorting of mail

• Banks
– automatic check readers, signature verification systems
– automated loan application classification

• Telephone Companies
– automatic voice recognition for directory inquiries
– automatic fraud detection,
– classification of phone numbers into groups

• Credit Card Companies

– automated fraud detection, automated screening of applications

• Computer Companies
– automated diagnosis for help-desk applications

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 AI Applications: Consumer Marketing
• Have you ever used any kind of credit/ATM/store card while
shopping?
– if so, you have very likely been “input” to an AI algorithm
• All of this information is recorded digitally
• Companies like Nielsen gather this information weekly and search
for patterns
– general changes in consumer behavior
– tracking responses to new products
– identifying customer segments: targeted marketing, e.g., they find out
that consumers with sports cars who buy textbooks respond well to
offers of new credit cards.
– Currently a very hot area in marketing

• How do they do this?

– Algorithms (“data mining”) search data for patterns
– based on mathematical theories of learning
– completely impractical to do manually

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AI Applications: Identification Technologies
• ID cards
– e.g., ATM cards
– can be a nuisance and security risk:
• cards can be lost, stolen, passwords forgotten, etc
• Biometric Identification
– walk up to a locked door
• camera
• fingerprint device
• microphone
– computer uses your biometric signature for
identification
• face, eyes, fingerprints, voice pattern

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AI Applications: Predicting the Stock Market
Value of ?
the Stock

time in days
• The Prediction Problem
– given the past, predict the future
– very difficult problem!
– we can use learning algorithms to learn a predictive model from
historical data
• prob(increase at day t+1 | values at day t, t-1,t-2....,t-k)

– such models are routinely used by banks and financial traders to

manage portfolios worth millions of dollars
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 AI-Applications: Machine Translation
• Language problems in international business
– e.g., at a meeting of Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Swedish investors, no
common language
– or: you are shipping your software manuals to 127 countries
– solution; hire translators to translate
– would be much cheaper if a machine could do this!

• How hard is automated translation

– very difficult!
– e.g., English to Russian
– “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (English)
– “the vodka is good but the meat is rotten” (Russian)
– not only must the words be translated, but their meaning also!

• Nonetheless....
– commercial systems can do alot of the work very well (e.g.,restricted vocabularies in
software documentation)
– algorithms which combine dictionaries, grammar models, etc.
– see for example babelfish.altavista.com
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