Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (CST208)

Credit: 3 (3-0-0)
Course Outline
• Introduction
• Intelligent Agent
• Problem Solving
• Searching
• Complex Environments
• Constraint Satisfaction Problems
• Knowledge-based Agents
• Uncertain Knowledge and Reasoning
• Expert Systems
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Books
1. S. J. Russell and P. Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A
Modern Approach, 4th ed. Pearson, 2020.
2. R. Akerkar, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.
Prentice-Hall of India, 2005.
3. G. F. Luger, Artificial Intelligence: Structures and
Strategies for Complex Problem Solving, 6th ed.
Pearson, 2009.
4. N. J. Nilsson, Artificial Intelligence: A New
Synthesis. Morgan Kaufmann, 1998.
5. K. L. Priddy and P. E. Keller, Artificial Neural
Networks: An Introduction. SIAM, 2005.

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Grading Scheme
• Mid-term: 30%

• End-term: 40%

• Assignments, Projects, Attendance: 30%

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Introduction

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Artificial Intelligence
• Intelligence
• “the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge”
• “the ability to act successfully across a wide-range of
objectives in complex environments.”

• Artificial Intelligence
• The study and construction of agent programs that
perform well
• in a given class of environments
• for a given agent architecture

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Artificial Intelligence
• Agent
• An entity that takes action in response to percepts
from an environment.

• Percepts
• The agent’s perception of the environment at a given
moment
• Example:
• For a robot, a percept could be input from its camera,
proximity sensors, or temperature detectors.
• For a software agent, a percept might include data
retrieved from a web page, a database, or an API.

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Versions / Dimensions

Verticals Human Rational

Systems that think Systems that

Thought
like humans think rationally

Systems that act Systems that act

Behaviour
like humans rationally

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Acting humanly: The 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
• a machine might have a 30% chance of fooling a lay person for
5 minutes by 2000
• Anticipated all major arguments against AI in following 50
years
HUMAN

HUMAN
INTERROGATOR ?
AI SYSTEM
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Acting humanly: The Turing test
• Suggested major components of AI:
• knowledge
• reasoning
• language understanding
• learning
• Problem:
• Turing test is not
• reproducible,
• constructive, or
• amenable to mathematical analysis

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Thinking humanly: Cognitive Science
• 1960s “cognitive revolution”:
• information-processing psychology replaced prevailing orthodoxy
of behaviorism
• Requires scientific theories of internal activities of the brain
• What level of abstraction?
• “Knowledge” or “circuits”?
• How to validate? Requires
• Predicting and testing behavior of human subjects (top-down) or
• Direct identification from neurological data (bottom-up)
• Both approaches are now distinct from AI
• Roughly termed, Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Both share with AI the following characteristic:
• the available theories do not explain (or engender) anything
resembling human-level general intelligence
• Hence, all three fields share one principal direction!

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Thinking rationally: Laws of Thought
• Normative (or prescriptive)
• rather than descriptive
• Aristotle
• what are correct arguments/thought processes?
• Syllogism
• Deductive reasoning in which a conclusion is derived from two
or more premises assumed to be true
• Socrates is a man; all men are mortal;
• Therefore, Socrates is mortal
• Laws of Thought
• Supposed to govern the operation of mind
• Initiates the field of LOGIC
• Several Greek schools developed various forms of logic
• notation and rules of derivation for thoughts

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Thinking rationally: Laws of Thought
• 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
• out of all the thoughts (logical or otherwise) that I could have?

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Acting rationally: Rational Agent
• Rational behavior
• Doing the right thing
• Out of many options
• The right thing:
• that 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

• Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics):

• Every art and every inquiry,
• and similarly, every action and pursuit,
• is thought to aim at some good
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Rational agents
• Agent
• an entity that perceives and acts
• Abstract view
• An agent is a function from percept histories to actions:
• f : P∗ → A
• → design best program for a given machine resources

• For any given class of environments and tasks

• Seek the agent (or class of agents)
• with the best performance
• Caveat
• computational limitations make perfect rationality
unachievable
• Limited rationality
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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
Psychology • adaptation
• phenomena of perception and motor control
• experimental techniques (psychophysics, etc.)
Economics • formal theory of rational decisions
Linguistics • knowledge representation, grammar
Neuroscience • plastic physical substrate for mental activity
Control theory • homeostatic systems, stability
• simple optimal agent designs
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History of AI
• McCulloch and Pitts (1943)
• Neural networks that learn
• Minsky (1951)
• Built a neural net computer
• Darmouth conference (1956):
• McCarthy, Minsky, Newell, Simon met,
• Logic theorist (LT)- proves a theorem in Principia Mathematica-Russel.
• The name “Artficial Intelligence” was coined.
• 1952-1969
• GPS (General Problem Solver)- Newell and Simon
• Geometry theorem prover - Gelernter (1959)
• Samuel’s Checkers that learns (1952)
• McCarthy - Lisp (1958), Advice Taker, Robinson’s resolution
• Microworlds: Integration, block-worlds.
• 1962- the perceptron convergence (Rosenblatt)
The Birthplace of
“Artificial Intelligence”, 1956
• Darmouth workshop, 1956:
• historical meeting of the precieved founders of AI met: John
McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Alan Newell, and Herbert Simon.

• A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project

on Artificial Intelligence. J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N.
Rochester, and C.E. Shannon. August 31, 1955. "We
propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial
intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at
Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The
study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that
every aspect of learning or any other feature of
intelligence can in principle be so precisely described
that a machine can be made to simulate it." And this
marks the debut of the term "artificial intelligence.“
History, continued
• 1966-1974 a dose of reality
• Problems with computation
• 1969-1979 Knowledge-based systems
• Weak vs. strong methods
• Expert systems:
• Dendral:Inferring molecular structures
• Mycin: diagnosing blood infections
• Prospector: recomending exploratory drilling (Duda).
• Roger Shank: no syntax only semantics
• 1980-1988: AI becomes an industry
• R1: Mcdermott, 1982, order configurations of computer systems
• 1981: Fifth generation
• 1986-present: return to neural networks
• Recent event:
• AI becomes a science: HMMs, planning, belief network
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
SHRLDU has just completed the command:
“Find a block which is taller than the one you are holding and put on the box”
Example of microworld.
Games
• 1950 Claude Shannon published a paper describing how
• a computer could play chess.
• 1952-1962 Arthur Samuel built the first checkers program
• 1957 Newell and Simon predicted that a computer will
• beat a human at chess within 10 years.
• 1967 MacHack was good enough to achieve a class-C
• rating in tournament chess.
• 1994 Chinook became the world checkers champion
• 1997 Deep Blue beat Kasparpov
• AI in Role Playing Games – now we need knowledge
State of the art
• Which of the following can be done at present?
• Play a decent game of table tennis
• Drive safely along a curving mountain road
• Drive safely along Telegraph Avenue
• Buy a week’s worth of groceries on the web
• Buy a week’s worth of groceries at Berkeley Bowl
• Play a decent game of bridge
• Discover and prove a new mathematical theorem
• Design and execute a research program in molecular biology
• Write an intentionally funny story
• Give competent legal advice in a specialized area of law
• Translate spoken English into spoken Swedish in real time
• Converse successfully with another person for an hour
• Perform a complex surgical operation
• Unload any dishwasher and put everything away

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Risks and Benefits of AI
• “First solve AI, then use AI to solve everything else.” Demis Hassabis,
CEO of Google DeepMind

• Benefits:
• Decrease repetitive work
• Increase production of goods and services
• Accelerate scientific research (disease cures, climate change and resource
shortages solutions)

• Risks:
• Lethal autonomous weapons
• Surveillance and persuasion
• Biased decision making
• Impact on employment
• Safety-critical applications
• Cybersecurity threats

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Risks and Benefits of AI
• Development of an artificial superintelligence
• that surpasses human intelligence may pose a
significant risk

• Analogous to the “Gorilla problem”

• Humans and gorillas evolved from the same species,
• but humans have more control than other primates.

• Thus, we should design AI systems in such a way

• that they do not end up taking control
• in the way that Turing suggests they might.

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See you next day!!!

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