INTRODUCTION TO

ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE

Nguyễn Ngọc Thảo – Nguyễn Hải Minh

{nnthao, nhminh}@fit.hcmus.edu.vn
Outline
• What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
• The foundations of AI
• A brief history of AI
• AI applications in various fields
• What are we going to learn?

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What is AI?
AI: A dream for everyone

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AI Innovations: Atlas Robot

Source: YouTube video

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AI Innovations: DALL·E 2

Source: YouTube video 6

Tesla’s Autopilot: Automated driver

Source: Autopilot | Tesla 7

Amazon Go: A store of the future

Source: YouTube video 8

AI Innovations: Deep Blue – AlphaGo

AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol

(03/2016)

Deep Blue vs. Kasparov

(02/1996 and 05/1997)

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The complexity of Chess and GO

Source: YouTube video 10

AI Innovations: OpenAI Five

Source: OpenAI Five

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Intelligence vs. Artificial Intelligence
Intelligence includes the capacity for logic, understanding,
learning, reasoning, creativity, and problem solving, etc.

Artificial intelligence (AI) attempts not just to understand

but also to build intelligent entities.
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The field of Artificial Intelligence
• AI is one of the newest fields in science and engineering.
• Work started in earnest soon after World War II
• The name was coined at a conference at Dartmouth College in
1956.

John McCarthy Marvin Minsky Allen Newell Arthur Samuel Herbert Simon
(1927 – 2011) (1927 – 2016) (1927 – 1992) (1901 – 1990) (1916 – 2001)

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The field of Artificial Intelligence
• AI research builds intelligent entities that simulate humans
in different aspects.

✓ Thinking: learning, planning, and

refining knowledge

✓ Perception: see, hear, feel, etc.

✓ Communication in natural languages

✓ Manipulation and moving objects

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What is Artificial Intelligence?

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What is Artificial Intelligence?
Thought processes and reasoning

Systems that Systems that

Rationality
think think
Humans

like humans rationally

Systems that Systems that

act act
like humans rationally

Behavior 16
Systems that act like humans
• The Turing Test approach (Alan Turing, 1950)

A computer passes the test if a human interrogator, after posing several written
questions, cannot tell whether the written responses come from a person or from a
computer.

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Systems that act like humans

• Problems with the Turing Test

ntelligent
nintelligent
Turing ehavior
human
test humans
ehavior
don t do

• Variations
• Reverse Turing Test: CAPTCHA
• Total Turing Test: additionally examine the perceptual (computer
vision) and the objects manipulation (robotics) abilities of the subject.
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Turing Test: Variations
• Reverse Turing Test: CAPTCHA

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Turing Test: Variations
• Total Turing Test: additionally examine the perceptual
(computer vision) and the objects manipulation (robotics)
abilities of the subject.

Sheep dog
or mop?

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A better Turing Test?
• AI researchers have devoted little effort to pass the test.
• It is more important to study the underlying principles of
intelligence than to duplicate an exemplar.

Image credit

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Systems that think like humans
• General Problem Solver – GPS (Newell and Simon, 1961)
• Not merely solve problems correctly
• Compare the trace of its reasoning steps to traces of human subjects
while solving the same problems

• Cognitive Science
• Computer models from AI precise and testable
theories of
• Experimental techniques from psychology the human mind

• These approaches are now distinct from AI

• Share the available theories but do not explain anything resembling
human intelligence
• All share a principal direction

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Systems that think rationally
• The laws of thought approach
• “Right thinking” = irrefutable reasoning processes
• E.g., Aristotle’s syllogisms provided patterns for argument structures
that always yielded correct conclusions when given correct
premises.

All men are mortal. x.man(x) mortal(x)

Socrates is a man. man(Socrates)
Therefore,
Socrates is mortal. mortal(Socrates)
Aristotle
(381BC – 322BC)
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Systems that think rationally
• Problems with the logicist approach
• Not all intelligence is mediated by logic behavior
• Solving a problem “in principle” is different from doing in practice
• Both obstacles apply to any attempt to build computational
reasoning systems

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Systems that act rationally
• The rational agent approach
• Rational behavior = “doing the right thing”.
• “Right thing”: what is expected to maximize goal achievement given
the available information
• An agent is just something that perceives and then acts
𝒇: 𝓟 → 𝓐
• A rational agent acts to achieve the best outcome or, when
there is uncertainty, the best expected outcome.
• Include thinking, inference as a part of being rational agent
• Include more: action without thinking, e.g., reflexes

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Systems that act rationally
• A behavior is either a reflex action or an intelligent one.
• A reflex action can be rational or not, while an intelligent
action is usually rational.
• An intelligent behavior is usually obtained via a learning process.

A man withdraws his fingers from a hot stove. Two people cross the street
at the crosswalk.
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Systems that act rationally
• More general than the “laws of thought” approach
• Correct inference is not all of rationality.
• In some situations, there is no provably correct thing to do, but
something must still be done.
• Amenable to scientific development than those based on
human behavior or human thought

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Major roles and Goals of AI
AI studies the intelligent part concerned with human and
represents those actions using computers.

Goals of AI

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Foundations
of AI
Research fields related to AI

Control theory Mathematics

and
cybernetics Philosophy

Linguistics Neuroscience

Economics Computer Psychology

Engineering
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Research fields related to AI
Field Description
Logic, methods of reasoning, mind as physical
Philosophy system, foundations of learning, language,
rationality.
Formal representation and proof, algorithms,
Mathematics computation, (un)decidability, (in)tractability,
probability.

Economics Utility, decision theory, rational economic agents

Neuroscience Neurons as information processing units.

Psychology/ How do people behave, perceive, process
Cognitive Science information, represent knowledge.
Computer Engineering Building fast computers
Design systems that maximize an objective
Control Theory
function over time
Linguistic Knowledge representation, grammar 31
Research fields related to AI

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Pros and Cons of AI
More powerful and more useful computers
New and improved interfaces
Solve new problems
Better handling of information
Relieve information overload
Conversion of information into knowledge

Increased costs
Difficulty with software development - slow and expensive
Few experienced programmers
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A brief
history of AI
A brief history of AI
• 1940-1950: Early days
• 1943: McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain
• 1950: Turing's “Computing Machinery and ntelligence”
• 1950—70: Excitement: Look, Ma, no hands!
• 1950s: Early AI programs, including Samuel's checkers program, Newell & Simon's
Logic Theorist, Gelernter's Geometry Engine
• 1956: Dartmouth meeting: “Artificial ntelligence” adopted
• 1965: Robinson's complete algorithm for logical reasoning
• 1970—90: Knowledge-based approaches
• 1969—79: Early development of knowledge-based systems
• 1980—88: Expert systems industry booms
• 1988—93: Expert systems industry busts: “A Winter”

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A brief history of AI
• 1990—: Statistical approaches
• Resurgence of probability, focus on uncertainty
• General increase in technical depth
• Agents and learning systems… “A Spring”?
• 2000—: Where are we now?

Source: Stack Exchange

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AI Applications
Autonomous Planning and Scheduling

Autonomous rovers
Autonomous rovers

Telescope scheduling

Analysis of data 38
Medicine

Classification on
medical images

Have you obtained positive cultures?

Yes.
What type of infection is it?
Primary bacteremia.
When did the symptoms first appear?
May 5
Diagnosis system
I recommend gentamycin using a doze of ...
(e.g., MYCIN)
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Games and Entertainment

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What are we
going to learn?
Main topics in AI
• Search (includes Game Playing)
• Representing knowledge and reasoning with it
• Planning
• Learning
• Natural language processing
• Expert systems
• Interacting with the Environment
• E.g., Vision, Speech recognition, Robotics, etc.
• And more…

We won’t have time in this course to consider all of these.

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Solving problems by searching
• Search is the fundamental technique of AI.
• Possible answers, decisions or courses of action are structured into
an abstract space, which we then search.
• Search is either “uninformed” or “informed”
• Uninformed: we move through the space without worrying about
what is coming next, but recognizing the answer if we see it
• Informed: we guess what is ahead and use that information to decide
where to look next.
• We may want to search for the first answer that satisfies our
goal or keep searching until we find the best answer.

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Solving problems by searching
• Uninformed and informed strategies
• Global vs. local search

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Solving problems by searching
• Adversarial search
• Constraint satisfaction problems

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Knowledge and reasoning
• The second most important concept in AI
• If we are going to act rationally in our environment, then we
must have some way to describe the given environment and
draw inferences from that representation.
• How do we describe what we know about the world ?
• How do we describe it concisely ?
• How do we describe it so that we can get hold of the right piece of
knowledge when we need it ?
• How do we generate new pieces of knowledge ?
• How do we deal with uncertain knowledge ?

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Knowledge and reasoning
• Propositional logic and predicate logic
• Inference techniques: forward chaining, backward chaining,
and resolution
• Uncertain knowledge and reasoning

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Machine learning
• If a system is going to act truly appropriately, then it must be
able to change its actions in the light of experience.
• How do we generate new facts from old ?
• How do we generate new concepts ?
• How do we learn to distinguish different situations in new
environments ?

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Machine learning
• Classification with ID3 Decision tree and Naïve Bayes
• Artificial neural networks

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