AI

BY

PRASHU
• Thinking rationally" means thinking based on reason
rather than emotion. It can also mean the ability to
draw sensible conclusions from facts, logic, and data
• KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Expected utility refers to the utility of an entity or aggregate economy
over a future period of time, given unknowable circumstances.
• Expected utility theory is used as a tool for analyzing situations in
which individuals must make a decision without knowing the
outcomes that may result from that decision.
• The expected utility theory was first posited by Daniel Bernoulli who
used it to solve the St. Petersburg Paradox.
• Expected utility is also used to evaluate situations without immediate
payback, such as purchasing insurance.
• Maximizing your expected utility means choosing the
option that has the highest average utility, where
average utility is the sum of all utilities weighted by
their probabilities. This theory is used to understand
decisions made in risky situations
• Homo sapiens—man the wise
AI
• For thousands of years, we have tried to understand how we think; that is, how a mere
handful of matter can perceive, understand, predict, and manipulate a world far larger
and more complicated than itself. The field of artificial intelligence, or AI, goes
further still: it attempts not just to understand but also to build intelligent entities.

• AI is one of the newest fields in science and

engineering. Work started in earnest soon after World
War II, and the name itself was coined in 1956.
What is AI
• In Figure 1.1 we see eight definitions of AI, laid out along two dimensions.

• The definitions on top are concerned with thought processes and reasoning, whereas the ones on
the bottom address behavior.

• The definitions on the left measure success in terms of fidelity to human performance, whereas the
ones on the right measure against an ideal performance measure, called rationality.

• A system is rational if it does the “right thing,” given what it knows.

fidelity
• faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated
by continuing loyalty and support.
Mental faculties
• Mental faculties are the cognitive or perceptual powers of the mind, or
the ability to think clearly. Some examples of mental faculties include:
• Imagination: The ability to conjure images in the mind, or to conceive
physical things through thought
• Memory: A mental faculty
• Intuition: A mental faculty
• Reason: A mental faculty
• Perception: A mental faculty
• Will: A mental faculty
• A rationalist approach involves a combination of
mathematics and engineering.
• A rationalist approach is a way of thinking that uses
reason as the primary source of knowledge, and that
reality has a logical structure. Rationalism is the
opposite of empiricism, which holds that all knowledge
comes from experience. Rationalists believe that there
are truths that can be directly understood by the
intellect, and that people can access these truths
without sensory experience.
Acting humanly: The Turing Test
approach
• The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing (1950), was designed to provide a
satisfactory operational definition of intelligence.
• A computer passes the test if a human interrogator, after posing some written
questions, cannot tell whether the written responses come from a person or from
a computer.

• The computer would need to possess the following capabilities:

• natural language processing to enable it to communicate successfully in English
• knowledge representation to store what it knows or hears
• automated reasoning to use the stored information to answer questions and to
draw new concluions.
• machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate
patterns
• To pass the total Turing Test, the computer will need
computer vision to perceive objects, and robotics to
manipulate objects and move about
Thinking humanly: The cognitive
modeling approach
• We need to get inside the actual workings of human minds.
• There are three ways to do this: through introspection—trying to catch our own
thoughts as they go by; through psychological experiments—observing a person in
action;
• and through brain imaging—observing the brain in action. Once we have a sufficiently
precise theory of
• the mind, it becomes possible to express the theory as a computer program

• The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science brings together computer models from
AI and experimental techniques from psychology to construct precise and testable
theories of the human mind
• The main difference between artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive
science is that AI is a technology that aims to simulate human
intelligence, while cognitive science is the study of the human mind:
• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• AI is a technology that allows machines to simulate human
intelligence, such as learning, problem solving, and decision
making. AI can be used to create systems that can see and identify
objects, understand human language, and perform specific tasks.
• Cognitive science
• Cognitive science is the study of the human mind and brain, and how
it represents and manipulates knowledge. Cognitive science is an
interdisciplinary field that includes philosophy, psychology,
neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology
• the purpose of AI is to think on its own and make
decisions independently, whereas the purpose of
Cognitive Computing is to simulate and assist human
thinking and decision-making.
Thinking rationally: The “laws of thought” approach

• The Greek philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to attempt to codify “right

thinking,” that is, irrefutable reasoning processes. His syllogisms provided

patterns for argument structures that always yielded correct conclusions when

given correct premises—for example, “Socrates is a man; all men are mortal;

therefore, Socrates is mortal.” These laws of thought were supposed to govern

the operation of the mind; their study initiated the field called logic
• Logicians in the 19th century developed a precise notation for statements about all
kinds of objects in the world and the relations among them.
• By 1965, programs existed that could, in principle, solve any solvable problem
described in logical notation
• The so-called logicist tradition within artificial intelligence hopes to build on such
programs to create intelligent systems
Acting rationally: The rational agent approach

• An agent is just something that acts (agent comes from the Latin agere, to
do). Of course, all computer programs do something, but computer agents are
expected to do more: operate autonomously, perceive their environment,
persist over a prolonged time period, adapt to

• change, and create and pursue goals. A rational agent is one that acts so as
to achieve the

• best outcome or, when there is uncertainty, the best expected outcome
• In the “laws of thought” approach to AI, the emphasis was on correct inferences.
Making
• correct inferences is sometimes part of being a rational agent, because one way to
act
• rationally is to reason logically to the conclusion that a given action will achieve
one’s goals
• and then to act on that conclusion. On the other hand, correct inference is not all of
rationality;
• in some situations, there is no provably correct thing to do, but something must still
be
• done. There are also ways of acting rationally that cannot be said to involve
inference. For
• example, recoiling from a hot stove is a reflex action that is usually more successful
than a
• slower action taken after careful deliberation
• All the skills needed for the Turing Test also allow an
agent to act rationally. Knowledge
• representation and reasoning enable agents to reach
good decisions. We need to be able to
• generate comprehensible sentences in natural language
to get by in a complex society. We
• need learning not only for erudition, but also because it
improves our ability to generate
• effective behavior
• The rational-agent approach has two advantages over the other approaches. First, it
• is more general than the “laws of thought” approach because correct inference is just
one
• of several possible mechanisms for achieving rationality

• Second, it is more amenable to scientific development than are approaches based on

human behavior or human thought. The
• standard of rationality is mathematically well defined and completely general, and can
be
• “unpacked” to generate agent designs that provably achieve it. Human behavior, on
the other
• hand, is well adapted for one specific environment and is defined by, well, the sum
total
• of all the things that humans do. This book therefore concentrates on general principles
• of rational agents and on components for constructing them
Foundations of AI

• Philosophy
• Can formal rules be used to draw valid conclusions?
• • How does the mind arise from a physical brain?
• • Where does knowledge come from?
• • How does knowledge lead to action?
• Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), whose bust appears on the front cover of this book
• was the first
• to formulate a precise set of laws governing the rational part of the mind. He
developed an
• informal system of syllogisms for proper reasoning, which in principle allowed one to
generate
• conclusions mechanically, given initial premises.

• Thomas
• Hobbes (1588–1679) proposed that reasoning was like numerical computation, that “we
add
• and subtract in our silent thoughts.” The automation of computation itself was already
well
• under way.
• The first
• known calculating machine was constructed around 1623 by the German scientist
Wilhelm
• Schickard (1592–1635), although the Pascaline, built in 1642 by Blaise Pascal (1623–
1662
• Pascal wrote that “the arithmetical machine produces effects which appear
• nearer to thought than all the actions of animals.”
• It’s one thing to say that the mind operates, at least in part, according to logical rules,
and
• to build physical systems that emulate some of those rules; it’s another to say that the
mind
• itself is such a physical system.
• Descartes was a strong advocate of the power
• of reasoning in understanding the world, a philosophy now called rationalism.
• But Descartes was also a proponent of dualism.
• He held that there is a part of the human mind (or soul or spirit) that is outside of
nature,
• exempt from physical laws.
• Animals, on the other hand, did not possess this dual quality;
• they could be treated as machines. An alternative to dualism is materialism, which
holds
• that the brain’s operation according to the laws of physics constitutes the mind
• The empiricism movement, starting with Francis Bacon’s (1561–
• 1626) Novum Organum,2 is characterized by a dictum of John Locke (1632–1704): “Nothing
• is in the understanding, which was not first in the senses.”
• David Hume’s (1711–1776) A
• Treatise of Human Nature (Hume, 1739) proposed what is now known as the principle of
• induction: that general rules are acquired by exposure to repeated associations between
their
• elements.
• the famous Vienna Circle, led by Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), developed the
• doctrine of logical positivism. This doctrine holds that all knowledge can be characterized
by
• logical theories connected, ultimately, to observation sentences that correspond to
sensory
• inputs; thus logical positivism combines rationalism and empiricism
• The confirmation theory of Carnap and Carl Hempel (1905–1997) attempted to
analyze the acquisition of knowl-
• edge from experience. Carnap’s book The Logical Structure of the World (1928) defined
an
• explicit computational procedure for extracting knowledge from elementary
experiences. It
• was probably the first theory of
• mind as a computational process.
• The final element in the philosophical picture of the mind is the connection between
• knowledge and action. This question is vital to AI because intelligence requires action
as well
• as reasoning. Moreover, only by understanding how actions are justified can we
understand
• how to build an agent whose actions are justifiable (or rational).
• Aristotle argued (in De Motu
• Animalium) that actions are justified by a logical connection between goals and
knowledge of
• the action’s outcome.
• Mathematics
• • What are the formal rules to draw valid conclusions?
• • What can be computed?
• • How do we reason with uncertain information?
• The first ALGORITHM nontrivial algorithm is thought to be Euclid’s algorithm for
computing
• greatest common divisors. The word algorithm (and the idea of studying them) comes
from
• al-Khowarazmi, a Persian mathematician of the 9th century, whose writings also
introduced
• Arabic numerals and algebra to Europe
• In 1931, G¨odel showed that limits on deduction do exist. His incompleteness
theorem showed that in any formal theory as strong as
• Peano arithmetic (the elementary theory of natural numbers), there are true
statements that
• are undecidable in the sense that they have no proof within the theory
• This fundamental result can also be interpreted as showing that some functions on the
• integers cannot be represented by an algorithm—that is, they cannot be computed. This
• motivated Alan Turing (1912–1954) to try to characterize exactly which functions are com
• putable—capable of being computed.
• Although decidability and computability are important to an understanding of computation,
the notion of tractability has had an even greater impact. Roughly speaking, a problem
• is called intractable if the time required to solve instances of the problem grows
exponentially
• with the size of the instances.
• The theory of NP-completeness, pioneered
• by Steven Cook (1971) and Richard Karp (1972), provides a method. Cook and Karp
• showed the existence of large classes of canonical combinatorial search and reasoning
problems
• that are NP-complete.
• Besides logic and computation, the third great contribution of mathematics to AI is the
• theory of probability. The Italian Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) first framed the idea of
• probability, describing it in terms of the possible outcomes of gambling events.
• Economics
• • How should we make decisions so as to maximize payoff?
• • How should we do this when others may not go along?
• • How should we do this when the payoff may be far in the future?

• The mathematical treatment of “preferred outcomes” or utility was

• first formalized by L´eon Walras (pronounced “Valrasse”) (1834-1910)
and was improved by
• Frank Ramsey (1931) and later by John von Neumann and Oskar
Morgenstern in their book
• The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944).
• Decision theory, which combines probability theory with
utility theory, provides a formal
• and complete framework for decisions (economic or
otherwise) made under uncertainty—
• that is, in cases where probabilistic descriptions
appropriately capture the decision maker’s
• environment. This is suitable for “large” economies
where each agent need pay no attention
• to the actions of other agents as individuals
• For “small” economies, the situation is much
• more like a game: the actions of one player can significantly affect the utility of
another
• (either positively or negatively). Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s development of
game
• theory (see also Luce and Raiffa, 1957) included the surprising result that, for some
games
• a rational agent should adopt policies that are (or least appear to be) randomized.
• This topic was pursued in the field of operations
• research, which emerged in World War II OPERATIONS from efforts in Britain to
optimize radar installa-
• RESEARCH
• tions, and later found civilian applications in complex management decisions. The work
of
• Richard Bellman (1957) formalized a class of sequential decision problems called
• The pioneering AI researcher
• Herbert Simon (1916–2001) won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1978 for his early
• work showing that models based on satisficing—making decisions that are “good
enough,”
• rather than laboriously calculating an optimal decision—gave a better description of
actual
• human behavior (Simon, 1947). Since the 1990s, there has been a resurgence of
interest in
• decision-theoretic techniques for agent systems (Wellman, 1995).
• Neuroscience
• • How do brains process information?
• Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system, particularly the brain. Although the
exact
• way in which the brain enables thought is one of the great mysteries of science, the
fact that it
• does enable thought has been appreciated for thousands of years because of the
evidence that
• strong blows to the head can lead to mental incapacitation
• it was known that
• NEURON the brain consisted of nerve cells, or neurons, but it was not until 1873 that
Camillo Golgi
• (1843–1926) developed a staining technique allowing the observation of individual
neurons
• in the brain (see Figure 1.2). This technique was used by Santiago Ramon y Cajal
(1852–
• 1934) in his pioneering studies of the brain’s neuronal structures.7 Nicolas Rashevsky
(1936,
• 1938) was the first to apply mathematical models to the study of the nervous sytem
• Brains and digital computers have somewhat different properties. Figure 1.3 shows that
• computers have a cycle time that is a million times faster than a brain. The brain
makes up
• for that with far more storage and interconnection than even a high-end personal
computer,
• although the largest supercomputers have a capacity that is similar to the brain’s.
• Futurists make much of these numbers, pointing to SINGULARITY an approaching
singularity at which
• computers reach a superhuman level of performance
• Psychology
• • How do humans and animals think and act?
• the behaviorism movement, led
• by John Watson (1878–1958), rejected any theory involving mental processes on the
grounds.
• Cognitive psychology, which views the brain as an information-processing device,
• can be traced back at least to the works of William James (1842–1910). Helmholtz also
• insisted that perception involved a form of unconscious logical inference. The cognitive
• viewpoint was largely eclipsed by behaviorism in the United States, but at Cambridge’s
Applied
• Psychology Unit, directed by Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969), cognitive modeling was
• able to flourish.
• Computer engineering
• • How can we build an efficient computer?
• The first operational computer was the electromechanical Heath Robinson,8
• built in 1940 by Alan Turing’s team for a single purpose: deciphering German
messages. In
• 1943, the same group developed the Colossus, a powerful general-purpose machine
based
• on vacuum tubes.9 The first operational programmable computer was the Z-3, the
invention
• of Konrad Zuse in Germany in 1941. Zuse also invented floating-point numbers and the
• first high-level programming language, Plankalk¨ul. The first electronic computer, the
ABC,
• was assembled by John Atanasoff and his student Clifford Berry between 1940 and
1942
• at Iowa State University.
• Control theory and cybernetics
• • How can artifacts operate under their own control?
• The central figure in the creation of what is CONTROL THEORY now called control
theory was Norbert
• Wiener (1894–1964). Wiener was a brilliant mathematician who worked with Bertrand
Russell,
• among others, before developing an interest in biological and mechanical control
systems
• and their connection to cognition.
• Wiener’s book Cybernetics (1948) became
• a bestseller and awoke the public to the possibility of artificially intelligent machines.
• Meanwhile, in Britain, W. Ross Ashby (Ashby, 1940) pioneered similar ideas. Ashby,
Alan
• Turing, Grey Walter, and others formed the Ratio Club for “those who had Wiener’s
ideas
• before Wiener’s book appeared.” Ashby’s Design for a Brain (1948, 1952) elaborated
on his
• idea that intelligence could be created by the use of homeostatic devices containing
appropriate
• feedback loops to achieve stable adaptive behavior.
• Modern control theory, especially the branch known as stochastic optimal control, has
• OBJECTIVE as its goal the design of systems that maximize an objective function
over time. This roughly
• FUNCTION
• Linguistics
• • How does language relate to thought?
• In 1957, B. F. Skinner published Verbal Behavior. This was a comprehensive, detailed
account
• of the behaviorist approach to language learning, written by the foremost expert in the
field
• Modern linguistics and AI, then, were “born” at about the same time, and grew up
• together, intersecting in a hybrid field COMPUTATIONAL called computational
linguistics or natural language
• LINGUISTICS
• processing. The problem of understanding language soon turned out to be
considerably more
• complex than it seemed in 1957. Understanding language requires an understanding of
the
• subject matter and context, not just an understanding of the structure of sentences.
This might
• seem obvious, but it was not widely appreciated until the 1960s. Much of the early
work in
• knowledge representation (the study of how to put knowledge into a form that a
computer
• can reason with) was tied to language and informed by research in linguistics, which
was
HISTORY OF AI
• The gestation of artificial intelligence (1943–1955)
• The first work that is now generally recognized as AI was done by Warren McCulloch and
• Walter Pitts (1943). They drew on three sources: knowledge of the basic physiology and
• function of neurons in the brain; a formal analysis of propositional logic due to Russell and
• Whitehead; and Turing’s theory of computation. They proposed a model of artificial neurons
• in which each neuron is characterized as being “on” or “off,” with a switch to “on” occurring
• in response to stimulation by a sufficient number of neighboring neurons. The state of a
• neuron was conceived of as “factually equivalent to a proposition which proposed its
adequate
• stimulus.”
• They showed, for example, that any computable function
could be computed by
• some network of connected neurons, and that all the logical
connectives (and, or, not, etc.)
• could be implemented by simple net structures. McCulloch
and Pitts also suggested that
• suitably defined networks could learn. Donald Hebb (1949)
demonstrated a simple updating
• rule for modifying the connection strengths between neurons.
His rule, now called Hebbian
• learning, remains an influential model to this day.
• Two undergraduate students at Harvard, Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds, built the
• first neural network computer in 1950. The SNARC, as it was called, used 3000 vacuum
• tubes and a surplus automatic pilot mechanism from a B-24 bomber to simulate a
network of
• 40 neurons. Later, at Princeton, Minsky studied universal computation in neural
networks.
• His Ph.D. committee was skeptical about whether this kind of work should be
considered
• mathematics, but von Neumann reportedly said, “If it isn’t now, it will be someday.”
Minsky
• was later to prove influential theorems showing the limitations of neural network
research
• There were a number of early examples of work that can be characterized as AI, but
• Alan Turing’s vision was perhaps the most influential. He gave lectures on the topic as
early
• as 1947 at the London Mathematical Society and articulated a persuasive agenda in his
1950
• article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Therein, he introduced the Turing Test,
• machine learning, genetic algorithms, and reinforcement learning. He proposed the
Child
• Programme idea, explaining “Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the
adult
• mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulated the child’s?”
The birth of artificial intelligence (1956)

• Princeton was home to another influential figure in AI, John McCarthy. After receiving his
• PhD there in 1951 and working for two years as an instructor, McCarthy moved to
Stanford
• and then to Dartmouth College, which was to become the official birthplace of the field

• AI is the only one

• of these fields that is clearly a branch of computer science (although operations
research does
• share an emphasis on computer simulations), and AI is the only field to attempt to build
• machines that will function autonomously in complex, changing environments.
• 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. An attempt will be made to find
• how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds
• of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a
• significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully
• selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer
Early enthusiasm, great expectations (1952–1969)

• Newell and Simon’s early success was followed up with the General Problem Solver,
• or GPS. Unlike Logic Theorist, this program was designed from the start to imitate
human
• problem-solving protocols. Within the limited class of puzzles it could handle, it turned
out
• that the order in which the program considered subgoals and possible actions was
similar to
• that in which humans approached the same problems. Thus, GPS was probably the first
program
• to embody the “thinking humanly” approach. The success of GPS and subsequent
programs
• as models of cognition led Newell and Simon (1976) to formulate the famous physical
• symbol system hypothesis, which states that “a physical symbol system has the
necessary and
• What they meant is that any system (human
• or machine) exhibiting intelligence must operate by manipulating data structures
composed
• of symbols.
• At IBM, Nathaniel Rochester and his colleagues produced some of the first AI programs.
• Herbert Gelernter (1959) constructed the Geometry Theorem Prover, which was
• able to prove theorems that many students of mathematics would find quite tricky.
Starting
• in 1952, Arthur Samuel wrote a series of programs for checkers (draughts) that
eventually
• learned to play at a strong amateur level
• John McCarthy moved from Dartmouth to MIT and there made three crucial
contributions
• in one historic year: 1958. InMIT AI LabMemo No. 1,McCarthy defined the high-level
• language Lisp, which was to become LISP the dominant AI programming language for
the next 30
• years.
• Also in 1958, McCarthy published a paper entitled Programs with Common Sense,
• in which he described the Advice Taker, a hypothetical program that can be seen as the
first
• complete AI system. Like the Logic Theorist and Geometry Theorem Prover, McCarthy’s
• program was designed to use knowledge to search for solutions to problems
• 1958 also marked the year that Marvin Minsky moved to MIT. His initial collaboration
• with McCarthy did not last, however. McCarthy stressed representation and reasoning
in formal
• logic, whereas Minsky was more interested in getting programs to work and eventually
• developed an anti-logic outlook. In 1963, McCarthy started the AI lab at Stanford. His
plan
• to use logic to build the ultimate Advice Taker was advanced by J. A. Robinson’s
discovery
• in 1965 of the resolution method (a complete theorem-proving algorithm for first-order
• logic; see Chapter 9). Work at Stanford emphasized general-purpose methods for
logical
• reasoning. Applications of logic included Cordell Green’s question-answering and
planning
• systems (Green, 1969b) and the Shakey robotics project at the Stanford Research
Institute
• Minsky supervised a series of students who chose limited problems that appeared to
• require intelligence to solve. These limited domains became known as microworlds.
James
• Slagle’s SAINT program (1963) was able to solve closed-form calculus integration
problems
• typical of first-year college courses. Tom Evans’s ANALOGY program (1968) solved
geometric
• analogy problems that appear in IQ tests. Daniel Bobrow’s STUDENT program (1967)
• solved algebra story problems, such as the following:
• If the number of customers Tom gets is twice the square of 20 percent of the number
• of advertisements he runs, and the number of advertisements he runs is 45, what is
the
• number of customers Tom gets?
• The most famous microworld was the blocks world, which consists of a
set of solid blocks
• placed on a tabletop (or more often, a simulation of a tabletop), as shown
in Figure 1.4.
• A typical task in this world is to rearrange the blocks in a certain way,
using a robot hand
• that can pick up one block at a time. The blocks world was home to the
vision project of
• David Huffman (1971), the vision and constraint-propagation work of
David Waltz (1975),
• the learning theory of Patrick Winston (1970), the natural-language-
understanding program
• of Terry Winograd (1972), and the planner of Scott Fahlman (1974).
• The work of Winograd and Cowan (1963) showed how a large number of
elements could
• collectively represent an individual concept, with a corresponding
increase in robustness and
• parallelism. Hebb’s learning methods were enhanced by Bernie Widrow
(Widrow and Hoff,
• 1960; Widrow, 1962), who called his networks adalines, and by Frank
Rosenblatt (1962)
• with his perceptrons. The perceptron convergence theorem (Block et al.,
1962) says that
• the learning algorithm can adjust the connection strengths of a
perceptron to match any input
• data, provided such a match exists.
A dose of reality (1966–1973)

• A typical story
• occurred in early machine translation efforts, which were generously funded by the U.S. National
• Research Council in an attempt to speed up the translation of Russian scientific papers
• in the wake of the Sputnik launch in 1957. It was thought initially that simple syntactic
transformations
• based on the grammars of Russian and English, and word replacement from an
• electronic dictionary, would suffice to preserve the exact meanings of sentences. The fact is
• that accurate translation requires background knowledge in order to resolve ambiguity and
• establish the content of the sentence. The famous retranslation of “the spirit is willing but
• the flesh is weak” as “the vodka is good but the meat is rotten” illustrates the difficulties
encountered.
• In 1966, a report by an advisory committee found that “there has been no machine
• translation of general scientific text, and none is in immediate prospect.” All U.S. government
• funding for academic translation projects was canceled. Today, machine translation is an
imperfect
• but widely used tool for technical, commercial, government, and Internet documents
• The illusion of unlimited computational power was not confined to problem-solving
• programs. Early experiments in machine evolution (now called genetic algorithms)
(Fried-
• berg, 1958; Friedberg et al., 1959) were based on the undoubtedly correct belief that
by
• making an appropriate series of small mutations to a machine-code program, one can
generate
• a program with good performance for any particular task. The idea, then, was to try
• random mutations with a selection process to preserve mutations that seemed useful.
Despite
• thousands of hours of CPU time, almost no progress was demonstrated. Modern genetic
• algorithms use better representations and have shown more successthe new back-propagation
learning algorithms
• for multilayer networks that were to cause an enormous resurgence in neural-net
• research in the late 1980s were actually discovered first in 1969 (Bryson and Ho, 1969).
Knowledge-based systems: The key
to power? (1969–1979
• The picture of problem solving that had arisen during the first decade of AI research
was of
• a general-purpose search mechanism trying to string together elementary reasoning
steps to
• find complete solutions. Such approaches have been called weak methods because,
although
• general, they do not scale up to large or difficult problem instances.
• The DENDRAL program (Buchanan et al., 1969) was an early example of this approach.
• It was developed at Stanford, where Ed Feigenbaum (a former student of Herbert
Simon),
• Bruce Buchanan (a philosopher turned computer scientist), and Joshua Lederberg (a
Nobel
• laureate geneticist) teamed up to solve the problem of inferring molecular structure
from the
• information provided by a mass spectrometer.
• Feigenbaum and others at Stanford began the Heuristic Programming
• Project (HPP) to investigate the extent to which the new methodology of expert
• systems could be applied to other areas of EXPERT SYSTEMS human expertise. The
next major effort was in
• the area of medical diagnosis. Feigenbaum, Buchanan, and Dr. Edward Shortliffe
developed
• MYCIN to diagnose blood infections. With about 450 rules, MYCIN was able to perform
• as well as some experts, and considerably better than junior doctors. It also contained
two
• major differences from DENDRAL.
• They had to be acquired from
• extensive interviewing of experts, who in turn acquired them from textbooks, other
experts,
• and direct experience of cases. Second, the rules had to reflect the uncertainty
associated with
• medical knowledge. MYCIN incorporated a calculus of uncertainty called certainty
factors
• (see Chapter 14), which seemed (at the time) to fit well with how doctors assessed the
impact
• of evidence on the diagnosis.
AI becomes an industry (1980–present

• The first successful commercial expert system, R1, began operation at the Digital Equipment
• Corporation (McDermott, 1982). The program helped configure orders for new computer
• systems; by 1986, it was saving the company an estimated $40 million a year. By 1988,
• DEC’s AI group had 40 expert systems deployed, with more on the way. DuPont had 100 in
• use and 500 in development, saving an estimated $10 million a year. Nearly every major U.S.
• corporation had its own AI group and was either using or investigating expert systems.
• In 1981, the Japanese announced the “Fifth Generation” project, a 10-year plan to build
• intelligent computers running Prolog. In response, the United States formed the Microelectronics
• and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) as a research consortium designed to
• assure national competitiveness. In both cases, AI was part of a broad effort, including chip
• design and human-interface research. In Britain, the Alvey report reinstated the funding that
• was cut by the Lighthill report.13 In all three countries, however, the projects never met their
• ambitious goals.
• Overall, the AI industry boomed from a few million dollars in 1980 to billions of dollars
• in 1988, including hundreds of companies building expert systems, vision systems,
robots,
• and software and hardware specialized for these purposes. Soon after that came a
period
• called the “AIWinter,” in which many companies fell by the wayside as they failed to
deliver
• on extravagant promises.
The return of neural networks (1986–present)

• In the mid-1980s at least four different groups

reinvented the back-propagation learning
• algorithm first found in 1969 by Bryson and Ho. The
algorithm was applied to many learning
• problems in computer science and psychology, and the
widespread dissemination of the
• results in the collection Parallel Distributed Processing
(Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986)
• caused great excitement
• These so-called connectionist models of intelligent systems were seen by some as
direct
• competitors both to the symbolic models promoted by Newell and Simon and to the
• logicist approach of McCarthy and others (Smolensky, 1988). It might seem obvious
that
• at some level humans manipulate symbols—in fact, Terrence Deacon’s book The
Symbolic Species (1997) suggests that this is the defining characteristic of humans—
but the most ardent
• connectionists questioned whether symbol manipulation had any real explanatory role
in
• detailed models of cognition
AI adopts the scientific method (1987–present)

• As David McAllester (1998) put it:

• In the early period of AI it seemed plausible that new forms of symbolic computation,
• e.g., frames and semantic networks, made much of classical theory obsolete. This led
to
• a form of isolationism in which AI became largely separated from the rest of computer
• science. This isolationism is currently being abandoned. There is a recognition that
• machine learning should not be isolated from information theory, that uncertain
reasoning
• should not be isolated from stochastic modeling, that search should not be isolated
from
• classical optimization and control, and that automated reasoning should not be isolated
• from formal methods and static analysis.
• In terms of methodology, AI has finally come firmly under the scientific method. To be accepted,
• hypotheses must be subjected to rigorous empirical experiments, and the results must
• be analyzed statistically for their importance (Cohen, 1995). It is now possible to replicate
• experiments by using shared repositories of test data and code.
• The field of speech recognition illustrates the pattern. In the 1970s, a wide variety of
• different architectures and approaches were tried. Many of these were rather ad hoc and
• fragile, and were demonstrated on only a few specially selected examples. In recent years,
• approaches based on hiddenMarkov models (HMMs) HIDDEN MARKOV have come to dominate the area. Two
• MODELS
• aspects of HMMs are relevant. First, they are based on a rigorous mathematical theory. This
• has allowed speech researchers to build on several decades of mathematical results developed
• in other fields. Second, they are generated by a process of training on a large corpus of
• real speech data. This ensures that the performance is robust, and in rigorous blind tests the
• HMMs have been improving their scores steadily. Speech technology and the related field of
• handwritten character recognition are already making the transition to widespread industrial and consumer applications. Note that
there is no scientific claim that humans use HMMs to
• recognize speech; rather, HMMs provide a mathematical framework for understanding the
• problem and support the engineering claim that they work well in practice
• Machine translation follows the same course as speech recognition. In the 1950s there
• was initial enthusiasm for an approach based on sequences of words, with models
learned
• according to the principles of information theory. That approach fell out of favor in the
• 1960s, but returned in the late 1990s and now dominates the field.
• Neural networks also fit this trend. Much of the work on neural nets in the 1980s was
• done in an attempt to scope out what could be done and to learn how neural nets differ
from
• “traditional” techniques. Using improved methodology and theoretical frameworks, the
field
• arrived at an understanding in which neural nets can now be compared with
corresponding
• techniques from statistics, pattern recognition, and machine learning, and the most
promising
• technique can be applied to each application. As a result of these developments, so-
• Judea Pearl’s (1988) Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems led to a new acceptance
• of probability and decision theory in AI, following a resurgence of interest epitomized
• by Peter Cheeseman’s (1985) article “In Defense of Probability.” The Bayesian network
• formalism was invented to allow efficient representation of, and rigorous reasoning with,
• uncertain knowledge. This approach largely overcomes many problems of the probabilistic
• reasoning systems of the 1960s and 1970s; it now dominates AI research on uncertain reasoning
• and expert systems. The approach allows for learning from experience, and it combines
• the best of classical AI and neural nets. Work by Judea Pearl (1982a) and by Eric Horvitz and
• David Heckerman (Horvitz and Heckerman, 1986; Horvitz et al., 1986) promoted the idea of
• normative expert systems: ones that act rationally according to the laws of decision theory
• and do not try to imitate the thought steps of human experts. The WindowsTM operating system
• includes several normative diagnostic expert systems for correcting problems. Chapters
• 13 to 16 cover this area.
The emergence of intelligent agents (1995–present

• The work of Allen Newell, John Laird,

• and Paul Rosenbloom on SOAR (Newell, 1990; Laird et al., 1987) is the best-known example
• of a complete agent architecture. One of the most important environments for intelligent
• agents is the Internet. AI systems have become so common in Web-based applications that
• the “-bot” suffix has entered everyday language.
• Artificial General Intelligence or AGI (Goertzel and
• Pennachin, 2007), which held its first conference and organized the Journal of Artificial General
• Intelligence in 2008. AGI looks for a universal algorithm for learning and acting in
• any environment, and has its roots in the work of Ray Solomonoff (1964), one of the attendees
• of the original 1956 Dartmouth conference. Guaranteeing that what we create is really
• FRIENDLY AI Friendly AI is also a concern (Yudkowsky, 2008; Omohundro, 2008), one we will
return to
• in Chapter 26.
• Despite these successes, some influential founders of AI, including John McCarthy
• (2007), Marvin Minsky (2007), Nils Nilsson (1995, 2005) and Patrick Winston (Beal and
• Winston, 2009), have expressed discontent with the progress of AI. They think that AI
should
• put less emphasis on creating ever-improved versions of applications that are good at a
specific
• task, such as driving a car, playing chess, or recognizing speech. Instead, they believe
• AI should return to its roots of striving for, in Simon’s words, “machines that think, that
learn
• and that create.” They call the effort human-level HUMAN-LEVEL AI AI or HLAI; their
first symposium was in
• 2004 (Minsky et al., 2004). The effort will require very large knowledge bases; Hendler
et al.
• (1995) discuss where these knowledge bases might come from.
• Despite these successes, some influential founders of AI, including John McCarthy
• (2007), Marvin Minsky (2007), Nils Nilsson (1995, 2005) and Patrick Winston (Beal and
• Winston, 2009), have expressed discontent with the progress of AI. They think that AI
should
• put less emphasis on creating ever-improved versions of applications that are good at a
specific
• task, such as driving a car, playing chess, or recognizing speech. Instead, they believe
• AI should return to its roots of striving for, in Simon’s words, “machines that think, that
learn
• and that create.” They call the effort human-level AI or HLAI; their first symposium
was in
• 2004 (Minsky et al., 2004). The effort will require very large knowledge bases; Hendler
et al.
• (1995) discuss where these knowledge bases might come from.
The availability of very large data sets (2001–present)

• One influential paper in this line was Yarowsky’s (1995) work on word-sense
disambiguation:
• given the use of the word “plant” in a sentence, does that refer to flora or factory?
• Previous approaches to the problem had relied on human-labeled examples combined
with
• machine learning algorithms. Yarowsky showed that the task can be done, with
accuracy
• above 96%, with no labeled examples at all. Instead, given a very large corpus of
unannotated
• text and just the dictionary definitions of the two senses—“works, industrial plant” and
• “flora, plant life”—one can label examples in the corpus, and from there bootstrap to
learn new patterns that help label new examples. Banko and Brill (2001) show that
techniques
• like this perform even better as the amount of available text goes from a million words
to a
• billion and that the increase in performance from using more data exceeds any
• Hays and Efros (2007) discuss the problem of filling in holes in a
• photograph. Suppose you use Photoshop to mask out an ex-friend from a group photo,
but
• now you need to fill in the masked area with something that matches the background.
Hays
• and Efros defined an algorithm that searches through a collection of photos to find
something
• that will match. They found the performance of their algorithm was poor when they
used
• a collection of only ten thousand photos, but crossed a threshold into excellent
performance
• when they grew the collection to two million photos
STATE OF THE ART: What can AI do today?

• Robotic vehicles: A driverless robotic car named STANLEY sped through

the rough
• terrain of the Mojave dessert at 22 mph, finishing the 132-mile course
first to win the 2005
• DARPA Grand Challenge. STANLEY is a Volkswagen Touareg outfitted with
cameras, radar,
• and laser rangefinders to sense the environment and onboard software
to command the steering,
• braking, and acceleration (Thrun, 2006). The following year CMU’s BOSS
won the Urban
• Challenge, safely driving in traffic through the streets of a closed Air
Force base, obeying
• traffic rules and avoiding pedestrians and other vehicles
• Speech recognition: A traveler calling United Airlines to
book a flight can have the entire
• conversation guided by an automated speech
recognition and dialog management system
• Autonomous planning and scheduling: A hundred million miles from Earth, NASA’s
• Remote Agent program became the first on-board autonomous planning program to
control
• the scheduling of operations for a spacecraft (Jonsson et al., 2000). REMOTE AGENT
generated
• plans from high-level goals specified from the ground and monitored the execution of
• those plans—detecting, diagnosing, and recovering from problems as they occurred.
Successor
• program MAPGEN (Al-Chang et al., 2004) plans the daily operations for NASA’s Mars
• Exploration Rovers, and MEXAR2 (Cesta et al., 2007) did mission planning—both
logistics
• and science planning—for the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission in
2008
• Game playing: IBM’s DEEP BLUE became the first computer program to defeat
the
• world champion in a chess match when it bested Garry Kasparov by a score of
3.5 to 2.5 in
• an exhibition match (Goodman and Keene, 1997). Kasparov said that he felt a
“new kind of
• intelligence” across the board from him. Newsweek magazine described the
match as “The
• brain’s last stand.” The value of IBM’s stock increased by $18 billion. Human
champions
• studied Kasparov’s loss and were able to draw a few matches in subsequent
years, but the
• most recent human-computer matches have been won convincingly by the
computer
• Spam fighting: Each day, learning algorithms classify
over a billion messages as spam,
• saving the recipient from having to waste time deleting
what, for many users, could comprise
• 80% or 90% of all messages, if not classified away by
algorithms. Because the spammers are
• continually updating their tactics, it is difficult for a
static programmed approach to keep up,
• and learning algorithms work best (Sahami et al., 1998;
Goodman and Heckerman, 2004).
• Logistics planning: During the Persian Gulf crisis of 1991, U.S. forces deployed a
• Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool, DART (Cross and Walker, 1994), to do
automated
• logistics planning and scheduling for transportation. This involved up to 50,000
vehicles,
• cargo, and people at a time, and had to account for starting points, destinations,
routes, and
• conflict resolution among all parameters. The AI planning techniques generated in
hours
• a plan that would have taken weeks with older methods. The Defense Advanced
Research
• Project Agency (DARPA) stated that this single application more than paid back
DARPA’s
• 30-year investment in AI.
• Robotics: The iRobot Corporation has sold over two
million Roomba robotic vacuum
• cleaners for home use. The company also deploys the
more rugged PackBot to Iraq and
• Afghanistan, where it is used to handle hazardous
materials, clear explosives, and identify
• the location of snipers
• Machine Translation: A computer program automatically translates
from Arabic to
• English, allowing an English speaker to see the headline “Ardogan
Confirms That Turkey
• Would Not Accept Any Pressure, Urging Them to Recognize Cyprus.”
The program uses a
• statistical model built from examples of Arabic-to-English
translations and from examples of
• English text totaling two trillion words (Brants et al., 2007). None of
the computer scientists
• on the team speak Arabic, but they do understand statistics and
machine learning algorithms
SUMMARY
• This chapter defines AI and establishes the cultural background against which it has
developed.
• Some of the important points are as follows:
• • Different people approach AI with different goals in mind. Two important questions to
• ask are: Are you concerned with thinking or behavior? Do you want to model humans
• or work from an ideal standard?
• In this book, we adopt the view that intelligence is concerned mainly with rational
• action. Ideally, an intelligent agent takes the best possible action in a situation. We
• study the problem of building agents that are intelligent in this sense.
• • Philosophers (going back to 400 B.C.) 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.
• • Mathematicians 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.
• • Economists formalized the problem of making decisions that maximize the expected
• outcome to the decision maker.
• • Neuroscientists discovered some facts about how the brain works and the ways in which
• it is similar to and different from computers.
• • Psychologists adopted the idea that humans and animals can be considered informationprocessing
• machines. Linguists showed that language use fits into this model.
• • Computer engineers provided the ever-more-powerful machines that make AI applications
• possible.
• Control theory deals with 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.
• • The history of AI has had cycles of success, misplaced optimism, and resulting
cutbacks
• in enthusiasm and funding. There have also been cycles of introducing new creative
• approaches and systematically refining the best ones.
• • AI has advanced more rapidly in the past decade because of greater use of the
scientific
• method in experimenting with and comparing approaches.
• • Recent progress in understanding the theoretical basis for intelligence has gone hand
in
• hand with improvements in the capabilities of real systems. The subfields of AI have
• become more integrated, and AI has found common ground with other disciplines