ADMAS UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE

 Getaneh T.
1
Department of CS
 E-Mail: [email protected]
WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?
 Intelligence:
 “the capacity to learn and solve problems”
 in particular,
 the ability to solve novel problems

 the ability to act rationally

 the ability to act like humans

 Artificial Intelligence
 build and understand intelligent entities or agents
 2 main approaches: “engineering” versus “cognitive
modeling”
2
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN INTELLIGENCE?
 Ability to interact with the real world
 to perceive, understand, and act
 e.g., speech recognition and understanding and synthesis
 e.g., image understanding
 e.g., ability to take actions, have an effect

 Reasoning and Planning

 modeling the external world, given input
 solving new problems, planning, and making decisions
 ability to deal with unexpected problems, uncertainties

 Learning and Adaptation(through programming)

 we are continuously learning and adapting
 our internal models are always being “updated”
 e.g., a baby learning to categorize and recognize animals
4
HISTORY OF AI
 1943: early beginnings
 McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain
 1950: Turing
 Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence“
 1956: birth of AI
 Dartmouth meeting: "Artificial Intelligence“ name adopted
 1950s: initial promise
 Early AIprograms, including
 Samuel's checkers program
 Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist
 1955-65: “great interest”
 Newell and Simon: GPS, general problem solver
 Gelertner: Geometry Theorem Prover
 McCarthy: invention of LISP

5
HISTORY OF AI
 1966—73: Reality dawns
 Realization that many AI problems are intractable
 Limitations of existing neural network methods identified
Neural network research almost disappears


 1969—85: Adding domain knowledge

 Development of knowledge-based systems
 Success of rule-based expert systems,
But were brittle and did not scale well in practice


 1986-- Rise of machine learning

 Neural networks return to popularity
 Major advances in machine learning algorithms and applications
 1990-- Role of uncertainty
 Bayesian networks as a knowledge representation framework
 1995-- AI as Science
 Integration
of learning, reasoning, knowledge representation
 AI methods used in vision, language, data mining, etc
6
HAL: FROM THE MOVIE 2001
 2001: A Space Odyssey
 classic science fiction movie from 1969

 HAL
 part of the story centers around an intelligent computer called HAL
 HAL is the “brains” of an intelligent spaceship
 in the movie, HAL can
 speak easily with the crew

 see and understand the emotions of the crew

 navigate the ship automatically

 diagnose on-board problems

 make life-and-death decisions

 display emotions

 In 1969 this was science fiction: is it still science fiction?

HAL AND AI

 HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality

 MIT Press, 1997, David Stork
 discusses
 HAL as an intelligent computer
 are the predictions for HAL realizable with AI

today?

8
CONSIDER WHAT MIGHT BE INVOLVED IN
BUILDING A COMPUTER LIKE HAL….

 What are the components that might be useful?

 Fasthardware?
 Chess-playing at grandmaster level?
 Speech interaction?
 speech synthesis
 speech recognition

 speech understanding

 Image recognition and understanding ?

 Learning?
 Planning and decision-making?
9
 CAN WE BUILD HARDWARE AS COMPLEX AS THE BRAIN?
 How complicated is our brain?
a neuron, or nerve cell, is the basic information processing unit
 estimated to be on the order of 10 12 neurons in a human brain
 many more synapses (10 14) connecting these neurons
 cycle time: 10 -3 seconds (1 millisecond)

 How complex can we make computers?

 108 or more transistors per CPU
 supercomputer: hundreds of CPUs, 10 12 bits of RAM
 cycle times: order of 10 - 9 seconds

 Conclusion
 YES: in the near future we can have computers with as many basic processing elements as our brain, but with
 far fewer interconnections (wires or synapses) than the brain
 much faster updates than the brain

 but building hardware is very different from making a computer behave like a brain!

10
CAN COMPUTERS BEAT HUMANS AT CHESS?
 Chess Playing is a classic AI problem
 well-definedproblem
 very complex: difficult for humans to play well

3000
2800 Deep Blue
Human World Champion
2600
Points Ratings

2400 Deep Thought

2200
Ratings
2000
1800
1600
1400
1200
1966 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1997
Conclusion:
 YES: today’s computers can beat even the best human
11
CAN COMPUTERS TALK?
 This is known as “speech synthesis”
 translate text to phonetic form
 e.g., “fictitious” -> fik-tish-es

 use pronunciation rules to map phonemes to actual sound

 e.g., “tish” -> sequence of basic audio sounds

 Difficulties
 sounds made by this “lookup” approach sound unnatural
 sounds are not independent
 e.g., “act” and “action”

 modern systems (e.g., at AT&T) can handle this pretty well

 a harder problem is emphasis, emotion, etc

 humans understand what they are saying

 machines don’t: so they sound unnatural

 Conclusion:
 NO, for complete sentences
 YES, for individual words

12
CAN COMPUTERS RECOGNIZE SPEECH?
 Speech Recognition:
 mapping sounds from a microphone into a list of words
 classic problem in AI, very difficult

 Recognizing single words from a small vocabulary

 systems can do this with high accuracy (order of

99%)
 e.g., directory inquiries

 limited vocabulary (area codes, city names)

 computer tries to recognize you first, if unsuccessful hands

you over to a human operator

 saves millions of dollars a year for the phone companies

13
RECOGNIZING HUMAN SPEECH (CTD.)
 Recognizing normal speech is much more difficult
 speech is continuous: where are the boundaries between words?
 e.g., “John’s car has a flat tire”

 large vocabularies
 can be many thousands of possible words

 we can use context to help figure out what someone said

 e.g., hypothesize and test

 try telling a waiter in a restaurant:

“I would like some dream and sugar in my coffee”

 background noise, other speakers, accents, colds, etc
 on normal speech, modern systems are only about 60-70% accurate
 Conclusion:
 NO, normal speech is too complex to accurately recognize
 YES, for restricted problems (small vocabulary, single speaker)

14
CAN COMPUTERS UNDERSTAND
SPEECH?
 Understanding is different to recognition:
 “Time flies like an arrow”
 assume the computer can recognize all the words

 how many different interpretations are there?

 1. time passes quickly like an arrow?

 2. command: time the flies the way an arrow times the flies

 3. command: only time those flies which are like an arrow

 4. “time-flies” are fond of arrows

 only 1. makes any sense,

 but how could a computer figure this out?
 clearly humans use a lot of implicit commonsense knowledge in

communication
 Conclusion: NO, much of what we say is beyond the
capabilities of a computer to understand at present 15
CAN COMPUTERS LEARN AND ADAPT ?
 Learning and Adaptation
 consider a computer learning to drive on the freeway
 we could teach it lots of rules about what to do
 or we could let it drive and steer it back on course when it heads for
the embankment
 systems like this are under development (e.g., Daimler Benz)

 machine learning allows computers to learn to do things.

 many successful applications:
 requires some “set-up”: does not mean your PC can learn to

forecast the stock market or become a brain surgeon

 Conclusion: YES, computers can learn and adapt by using programs ,

when presented with information in the appropriate way

16
CAN COMPUTERS “SEE”?
 Recognition v. Understanding (like Speech)
 Recognition and Understanding of Objects in a scene
 look around this room
 you can effortlessly recognize objects

 human brain can map 2d visual image to 3d “map”

 Why is visual recognition a hard problem?

Conclusion:
 mostly NO: computers can only “see” certain types of objects
under limited circumstances
 YES for certain constrained problems (e.g., face recognition)
17
CAN COMPUTERS PLAN AND MAKE OPTIMAL DECISIONS?
 Intelligence
 involves solving problems and making decisions and plans
 e.g., you want to take a holiday in Brazil
 you need to decide on dates, flights

 you need to get to the airport, etc

 involves a sequence of decisions, plans, and actions

 What makes planning hard?

 the world is not predictable:
 your flight is canceled or there’s a backup on the 405

 there are a potentially huge number of details

 do you consider all flights? all dates?

 no: commonsense constrains your solutions

 AI systems are only successful in constrained planning problems

 Conclusion: NO, real-world planning and decision-making is still beyond the
capabilities of modern computers
 exception: very well-defined, constrained problems
18
SUMMARY OF STATE OF AI SYSTEMS IN
PRACTICE
 Speech synthesis, recognition and understanding
 very useful for limited vocabulary applications
 unconstrained speech understanding is still too hard

 Computer vision
 works for constrained problems (hand-written zip-codes)
 understanding real-world, natural scenes is still too hard
 Learning
 adaptive systems are used in many applications: have their limits
 Planning and Reasoning
 only works for constrained problems: e.g., chess
 real-world is too complex for general systems
 Overall:
 many components of intelligent systems are “doable”
 there are many interesting research problems remaining
19
FOUNDATION OF AI
 Philosophy
 made AI conceivable by considering the ideas that the mind
is in some ways like a machine, that it operates on knowledge
encoded in some internal language, and that thought can be
used to choose what actions to take
 Mathematics
 provided the tools to manipulate statements of logical
certainty as well as uncertain, probabilistic statements. They
also set the groundwork for understanding computation and
reasoning about algorithms.

20
FOUNDATION OF AI
 Economics
 formalized the problem of making decisions that maximize
the expected outcome to the decision maker
 Neuroscience
 how the brain works and the ways in which it is similar to
and different from computers
 Psychology
 ideathat humans and animals can be considered information
processing machines

21
FOUNDATION OF AI
 Computer engineering
 provided the ever-more-powerful machines that make Al
applications possible
 Control theory
 designing devices that act optimally on the basis of feedback
from the environment. Initially, the mathematical tools of
control theory were quite different from AI, but the fields are
coming closer together
 Linguistics
 Used knowledge representation which is the study of how to
put knowledge into a form that a computer can reason with

22