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Chapter 1 Introduction Updated

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bthynhaljhny34
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Fundamentals of Artificial

Intelligence

Introduction
Basic information about course

• Su 12:15-13:30
• Tu 10:00-11:15
• Text: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
• Instructor: Dr. Abdallah Mohamed, TA. Farah Albishri
Prerequisites
• Comfortable programming in language such as C (or C++) or Java
• Some knowledge of algorithmic concepts such as running times of
algorithms;
• Some familiarity with probability (we will go over this from the
beginning but we will cover the basics only briefly)
• Not scared of mathematics, some background in discrete
mathematics, able to do simple mathematical proofs
• If you do not have a standard undergraduate computer science
background, talk to me first.
• Well-prepared undergraduates are certainly welcome
Grading
• Assignments: 10%
– May discuss with another person; writeup and
code must be your own
• Quizzes: 15%
• Midterm exams: 30%
• Final exam: 40%
• Participation: 5%
What is artificial intelligence?
• AI is
• A serious science.
Real AI
• General-purpose AI like the robots of science
fiction is incredibly hard
– Human brain appears to have lots of special and
general functions, integrated in some amazing way
that we really do not understand at all (yet)
• Special-purpose AI is more doable (nontrivial)
– E.g., chess/poker playing programs, logistics
planning, automated translation, voice recognition,
web search, data mining, medical diagnosis,
keeping a car on the road, … … … …
if our system can be
Definitions of AI more rational than
humans in some
cases, why not?

Systems that think Systems that think


focus on action avoids like humans rationally
philosophical issues
such as “is the system Systems that act Systems that act
conscious” etc. like humans rationally

• We will follow “act rationally” approach


– Distinction may not be that important
• acting rationally/like a human presumably requires (some
sort of) thinking rationally/like a human,
• humans much more rational anyway in complex domains
Turing Test

image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test


Turing Test

image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test


image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
Lessons from AI research
• Clearly-defined tasks that we think require intelligence and education
from humans tend to be doable for AI techniques
– Playing chess, drawing logical inferences from clearly-stated facts, performing
probability calculations in well-defined environments, …
– Although, scalability can be a significant issue

• Complex, messy, ambiguous tasks that come natural to humans (in


some cases other animals) are much harder
– Recognizing your grandmother in a crowd, drawing the right conclusion from an
ungrammatical or ambiguous sentence, driving around the city, …

• Humans better at coming up with reasonably good solutions


in complex environments
• Humans better at adapting/self-evaluation/creativity (“My
usual strategy for chess is getting me into trouble against
this person… Why? What else can I do?”)
Early history of AI
• 50s/60s: Early successes! AI can draw logical conclusions,
prove some theorems, create simple plans… Some initial
work on neural networks…
• Led to overhyping: researchers promised funding agencies
spectacular progress, but started running into difficulties:
– Ambiguity: highly funded translation programs (Russian to English)
were good at syntactic manipulation but bad at disambiguation
• “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” becomes “The vodka is good but the
meat is rotten”

– Scalability/complexity: early examples were very small, programs could


not scale to bigger instances
– Limitations of representations used
History of AI…
• 70s, 80s: Creation of expert systems (systems
specialized for one particular task based on
experts’ knowledge), wide industry adoption
• Again, overpromising…
• … led to AI winter(s)
– Funding cutbacks, bad reputation
Modern AI
• More rigorous, scientific, formal/mathematical
• Fewer grandiose promises
• Divided into many subareas interested in particular
aspects
• More directly connected to “neighboring” disciplines
– Theoretical computer science, statistics, economics,
operations research, biology, psychology/neuroscience, …
– Often leads to question “Is this really AI”?
• Some senior AI researchers are calling for re-
integration of all these topics, return to more
grandiose goals of AI
– Somewhat risky proposition for graduate students and
junior faculty…
This course
• Focus on general AI techniques that have
been useful in many applications
• Will try to avoid application-specific techniques
(still interesting and worthwhile!)
Topics
• Search
• Constraint satisfaction problems
• Game playing
• Logic, knowledge representation
• Planning
• Probability, decision theory, game theory,
reasoning under uncertainty
• Machine learning, reinforcement learning

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