Artificial Intelligence

CS 165A
Fall 2004
Lecture 1

Prof. Terry Smith

 Course introduction and overview

• Course administrivia
• Overview of AI
Goals of this course
• To teach you the main ideas of AI
• To introduce you to a set of key techniques and algorithms
from AI
• To help you understand what’s hard in AI and why
• To see how AI relates to the rest of computer science
• To get you thinking about how AI can be applied to a
variety of real problems
• To have fun
Course administrivia
• Web sites
– http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~cs165a
– http://groups.yahoo.com/group/UCSB-CS165A
• Syllabus
– Discussion sessions
– Schedule
– Assignments
 Assignment #0 due on Tuesday!

• Expectations
– Come to class, and come prepared
– Participate: Ask questions, offer insight, tell me I’m wrong...
– Think!
What is Artificial Intelligence?
• AI in the media
– Popular movies
 2001: A Space Odyssey
 Star Trek
 The Terminator
 AI: The Movie
– Popular press, novels
• Often portrayed as
– A property of evil computers
– Computers doing impossible things
• Public view
– Books and movies have inspired many AI researchers
– Books and movies have raised the public’s expectations
What is Artificial Intelligence? (cont.)
“The science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially
intelligent computer programs.”
“The business of getting computers to do things they cannot already do, or
things they can only do in movies and science fiction stories.”
“The study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment,
people are better.”
“The design of flexible programs that respond productively in situations
that were not specifically anticipated by the designer.”
“The construction of computations that perceive, reason, and act
effectively in uncertain environments.”
“The branch of CS concerned with enabling computers to simulate such
aspects of human intelligence as speech recognition, deduction,
inference, creative response, the ability to learn from experience, and
the ability to make inferences given incomplete information.”
“Modeling aspects of human cognition on computers”
“What AI people do”
Goals of AI
• Scientific
– To understand the principles and mechanisms that account for
intelligent action

To create models and mechanisms of intelligent action

• Engineering
– To design intelligent systems that can survive and operate in the
real world and solve problems of considerable scientific difficulty
at high levels of competence

To understand and build intelligent systems

Intelligent systems
• An intelligent system is characterized as one that can:
– Exhibit adaptive, goal-oriented behavior
– Learn from experience
– Use vast amounts of knowledge
– Exhibit self-awareness
– Interact with humans using language and speech
– Tolerate error and ambiguity in communication
– Respond in real-time
What AI people study
• Logic • Speech recognition
• Knowledge representation • Natural language processing
• Search • Computer vision
• Reasoning/inference • Pattern recognition
• Non-monotonic reasoning • Intelligent agents
• Planning • Robotics
• Probabilistic reasoning • Neural networks
• Naïve physics • Data mining
• Machine learning • Expert systems

… and more…
What AI people (and programs) do
• Prove theorems • Create speech recognition and
• Emulate/model human cognitive understanding systems for various
abilities domains
• (Attempt to) solve exponentially hard • Process text to { understand,
problems summarize, correct, respond, etc. }
• Build expert systems for diagnostic • Create data mining systems to
tasks (e.g, medical diagnosis, error process very large amounts of
analysis) information (e.g., bioinformatics)
• Build robots
• Build intelligent agents to look and
• Build machine vision systems for act in socially useful ways
industrial tasks, surveillance, consumer
apps, etc. • Develop computer games

… and more…
Some notable AI systems
• IBM’s Deep Blue
– Beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997
– Kasparov vs. (Israeli-built) Deep Junior, January 2003 (ended in a draw)
– Kasparov vs. X3D Fritz, November 2003
• Expert systems
– Medical diagnosis
 A computerized Leukemia diagnosis system did a better job checking for
blood disorders than human experts
• Speech recognition
– Commercial systems by Dragon, IBM, and others
– Phone-based systems (e.g., airline reservations)
• Automatic scheduling for manufacturing operations
• User interface
– Grammar and spelling checkers, automated help
Some notable AI systems (cont.)
• Data mining
– Fraud detection, credit scoring, customer profiles and preferences,
genome analysis
• Cyc
– Doug Lenat’s 18-year old project to give computer common sense
• Computer vision
– E.g., “Hands Across America” 1995
– Face recognition systems for biometrics
• Robotics
– Mars Rover, robots for hazard environments, factory automation
– Sony, Honda, others: robot pets
– CMU Navlab drove across country (2797/2849 miles)
 1980s – DARPA ALV Program
– DARPA Grand Challenge 2004
 Failed in 2004…repeat in October 2005
 http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge

DARPA Grand Challenge

“DARPA intends to conduct a challenge of autonomous ground vehicles
between Los Angeles and Las Vegas in March of 2004. A cash award of $1
million will be granted to the team that fields the first vehicle to complete
the designated route within a specified time limit.”
Terrain between LA and Las Vegas
Perspectives on AI / Disciplines involved
• AI functions as a channel of ideas between computing and
other fields, ideas that have profoundly changed those
fields
– Logic
– Mathematics
– Statistics
– Philosophy
AI
– Psychology
– Linguistics
– Neuroscience
– Computer science
– Cognitive science
Foundations of AI
• Philosophy
– Framed the ideas of AI
 Dualism/materialism, logical/rational/empirical, causality,
consciousness, mind/body…
• Mathematics
– Formalized computation, logic, probability
– Possibilities and limitations of computation
• Psychology
– Experimental: the brain as an information processing device
(Cognitive Science)
• Computer Engineering
– Built real machines, Moore’s Law progress
AI and Computer Science
• AI is mostly about software (usually large and complex)
– Important: Algorithms, tools, complexity, etc.

• Early advanced in CS due to AI researchers include:

– Search algorithms
– List structures, pointers
– Virtual memory
– Dynamic memory allocation
– Garbage collection
– Logical programming

• CS 165A will be taught primarily from a CS perspective

– Not the only perspective, though
UCSB CS AI Sequence: 165A and 165B
165A. Artificial Intelligence (Fall)
(4) TURK
Prerequisites: Computer Science 130A; open to computer science majors only
An introduction to the field of Artificial Intelligence, which attempts to understand and build
intelligent systems. Topics include AI programming languages, search, logic, knowledge
representation and reasoning, game playing, planning, uncertainty, perception, and intelligent
agents. 

165B. Machine Learning (Winter)

(4) SMITH / SU
Prerequisites: Computer Science 165A
The course covers the most important techniques of machine learning (ML) and includes
discussions of: well-posed learning problems; artificial neural networks; concept learning and
general to specific ordering; decision tree learning; genetic algorithms; learning sets of rules;
Bayesian learning; analytical learning; and combining inductive and analytical learning. The
course integrates these approaches to learning with fundamental aspects of machine
intelligence (MI), including search, knowledge representation and reasoning, and
applications. 
“Proper” background
• Blind search (depth-first, breadth-first)
– CS 130A
• Trees (programming)
– CS 20, 50, 130A
• Boolean logic, Propositional logic, First-order logic
– CS 40
• Probability, Bayes rule
– PSTAT 120A
• Parsing
– CS 20, 160 (some)
• C++ / Java
– several
AI = “A” + “I”
• Artificial
– As in “artificial flowers” or “artificial light”?

• Intelligence
– What is intelligence?
 The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge

 The faculty of thought and reason

 Secret information, especially about an actual or potential enemy

 Symbol manipulation, grounded in perception of the world

 The computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world

– What makes someone more/less intelligent than another?

– Are {monkeys, ants, trees, babies, chess programs} intelligent?
– How can we know if a machine is intelligent?

Turing Test (Alan Turing, 1950), a.k.a. The Imitation Game

 Replicating human intelligence?
• AI doesn’t necessarily seek to replicate human intelligence
• Sometimes more, sometimes less…

• “Essence of X” vs. “X”

• Examples
– Physical vs. electronic newspaper
– Physical vs. virtual shopping
– Birds vs. planes

“Saying Deep Blue doesn’t really think about chess is like saying
an airplane doesn’t really fly because is doesn’t flap its wings.”
– Drew McDermott
“Strong AI” vs. “Weak AI”
• “Strong AI”
– Makes the bold claim that computers can be made to think on a
level (at least) equal to humans
– One version: The Physical Symbol System Hypothesis
 A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient
means for general intelligent action
 Intelligence = symbol manipulation (perhaps grounded in
perception and action)
• “Weak AI”
– Some “thinking-like” features can be added to computers to make
them more useful tools
– Examples: expert systems, speech recognition, natural language
understanding….
“Strong AI” vs. “Weak AI” (cont.)
• Principles of “Strong AI”
– Intelligent behavior is explicable in scientific terms; a rigorous
understanding of intelligence is possible
– Intelligence can take place outside the human skull
– The computer is the best laboratory instrument for exploring these
propositions

• Maybe…
– Strong AI is science?
– Weak AI is engineering?
Philosophical and ethical implications
• Is “Strong AI” possible?
• If so (or even if not)…
– Should we be worried? Is this technology a threat? (Bill Joy)
– Is it okay to kill an intelligent machine?
– When will it happen? (Will we know?)
– Will they keep us around? (Kurzweil, Moravec)
– Might we become too dependent on technology?
– Terrorism, privacy
• Main categories of objections to AI
– Nonsensical (Searle)
– Impossible (Penrose)
– Unethical, immoral, dangerous (Weizenbaum)
– Failed (Wall Street)
Another way of looking at AI

Human Ideal

Thought
processes and Systems that think Systems that think
reasoning like humans rationally

Behavior Systems that act Systems that act

like humans rationally
Human/Biological Intelligence
• Thinking humanly (Cognitive modeling)
– Cognitive science
 1960s – Information processing replaced behaviorism as the
dominant view in psychology
– Cognitive neuroscience
 Neurophysiological basis of intelligence and behavior?

• Acting humanly (Operational intelligence)

– The Turing Test – operational test for intelligent behavior
 What does it require?
– Required: knowledge, reasoning, language understanding,
learning…
– Problem: It is not reproducible or amenable to mathematical
analysis; rather subjective
Ideal/Abstract Intelligence
• Thinking rationally (Laws of Thought)
– Rational thought: governed by “Laws of Thought”
– Logic approach – mathematics and philosophy

• Acting rationally (Rational agents)

– Rational behavior: doing the right thing
 Maximize goal achievement, given the available information
(knowledge + perception)
– Can/should include reflexive behavior, not just thinking
– General rationality vs. limited rationality
– Basic definition of agent – something that perceives and acts
How can you tell it’s AI?
• It does something that is clearly “human-like”

…or…

• Separation of
– data/knowledge
– operations/rules
– control
• Has
– a knowledge representation framework
– problem-solving and inference methods
Why study AI?
• It’s fascinating
– Deep questions about intelligence, consciousness, the nature of being
human
– Grand challenges – creating intelligent machines
– Multidisciplinary endeavor
• It leads to a different perspective on computer science issues
– Levels of explanation
– Search, problem solving, etc. – higher level approach
– Exponential, NP-hard problems
• It’s good background for related areas
– Computer vision, speech recognition, natural language understanding,
probabilistic reasoning systems, machine learning, etc.
A quote

The hardest applications and most challenging problems, throughout

many years of computer history, have been in artificial intelligence –
AI has been the most fruitful source of techniques in computer
science. It led to many important advances, like data structures and list
processing... artificial intelligence has been a great stimulation. Many
of the best paradigms for debugging and for getting software going, all
of the symbolic algebra systems that were built, early studies of
computer graphics and computer vision, etc., all had very strong roots
in artificial intelligence.

— Donald Knuth
Will it get me a job?
• Well….
– Not as many AI jobs as Java programming jobs….

• But…
– See web site (Announcements) for relevant articles
– AI is a component of many advanced technologies
– A thorough understanding of the concepts covered in the course
will make you a better computer scientist
– You will have a broader array of tools with which to approach
problems
– You will better be able to evaluate technologies with AI
components
– AI related research usually requires a graduate degree
A note on AI programming
• Lisp
– List processing
– Interpreter – great for fast prototyping
– Features: garbage collection, dynamic typing, ….
• Prolog
– Logic programming
– Program = set of logical statements + general theorem prover

• Other high-level languages (Java, C++, etc.)

Top AI Schools and Companies
• Top AI Schools
– Stanford University
– MIT
– Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
– Berkeley

– Also Toronto, Washington, Illinois, Texas, Maryland, Edinburgh,

UCLA, Karlsruhe, and many others.…

• Top research labs

– Microsoft Research (MSR)
– IBM Research
– AT&T Labs
– Xerox PARC, SRI, ATR (Japan), …
Reminders
• Peruse the course web site
• Join the Yahoo group
• Keep up with assigned reading
• Assignment #0 due Tuesday
• First discussion session next Wed., 3pm
– Review of relevant prerequisites: data structures, probability and
statistics, logic
– Info on using CSIL (if necessary)
Tuesday Quiz
1. Name a discipline that has significantly contributed to the
historical foundations of AI
– Briefly, how did it contribute to AI?

2. Alexander Kronrod, a Russian AI researcher, said “Chess

is the Drosophila of AI.”
– Briefly explain this statement.