Outline

• What is AI?
• A brief history
• The state of the art
 What is AI?
Views of AI fall into four categories:

Thinking humanly Thinking rationally

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

• Predicted that by 2000, a machine might have a 30% chance of

fooling a lay person for 5 minutes
• Anticipated all major arguments against AI in following 50 years
• Suggested major components of AI: knowledge, reasoning,
language understanding, learning
•
The computer would need to possess the following
capabilities:

• Natural language processing: to enable it to

communicate successfully in English
• Knowledge representation: to store what it
knows or hears
• Automated reasoning: to use the stored
information to answer questions and to draw new
conclusions
• Machine learning: to adapt to new
circumstances and to detect and extrapolate
patterns
 Total Turing Test
• Includes a video signal – interrogator can
test the subject’s “perceptual capabilities”,
as well as the opportunity to pass physical
objects “through the hatch”
• To pass Total Turing Test, the computer
will need:
• Computer Vision: to perceive the objects,
and
• Robotics: to manipulate objects and
move about.
 Thinking humanly: cognitive
modeling
• 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
•
 Thinking rationally: "laws of
thought"
• 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?
 Acting rationally: rational agent
• 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
 Rational agents
• 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
•
• Computational limitations make perfect rationality
unachievable  design best program for given machine
resources
•
 AI prehistory
• 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
 Abridged history of AI
• 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
 State of the art
• 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 crossword puzzles better than most
humans
 State of the Art
• Robotic Vehicles (STANLY, CMU’S BOSS)
• Speech Recognition (United Airlines reservation)
• Autonomous planning and scheduling (Remote Agent –
Spacecraft, Mars Explorer)
• Game playing (IBM DEEP BLUE, ALPHA GO/DeepMind)
• Spam fighting
• Logistics planning (automated logistics planning and
scheduling for transportation during Gulf war in 1991)
• Robotics (iRobot corporation’s Roomba Vacuum Cleaner
robot)
• Machine translation (Arabic to English; statistics and ML
only)