Werabe University

Institute of Technology

Department of IT

Course: Artificial Intelligence

 Chapter One
Introduction to AI
Outline
• Overview of AI
• AI vs. HI
• Views of AI
• History of AI
• Programming Paradigms
 Intelligence
• Intelligence is the capability of observing, learning,
remembering & reasoning.
• AI attempts to develop intelligent agents.

Characteristics of Intelligent system

• Use vast amount of knowledge
• Learn from experience and adopt to changing environment
• Interact with human using language and speech
• Respond in real time
• Tolerate error and ambiguity in communication
 Human Intelligence
How do people Reason?
 They create categories & relate one concept to another: Reasoning by analogy:

From the fact that: A is like B. M is in A. N is in B. Can we say “M is like N”?

 They use specific rules: rule-based reasoning

– if ‘a’ then ’b’
if ‘b’ then ‘c’
abc
• Use Past Experience, “CASES” (case-based reasoning)
– Similarities of current and previous case
– Store cases using key attributes
• Use “Expectations” (probabilistic reasoning)
– With the help of previous experience, they guess the probability of occurrence of
events or guess solution for the problem at hand.
 Deductive and inductive reasoning
• Deductive reasoning: reasoning from general
premises, which are known or presumed to be
known, to more specific, certain conclusions.
– Gravity makes things fall. Hence, the apple that hit my
head was due to gravity.
– All athletes work out in the gymnasium. Henok is an athlete. Therefore,
Henok works out in the gymnasium.
•Inductive reasoning: reasoning from a set of specific facts or
individual cases to a more general, but uncertain, conclusions.
– The first five apples I picked from this tree are sweet, my friend also
mentioned the apples from this tree are sweet. Therefore, All apples from
this tree are sweet.
 Examples
• A classic example of deductive reasoning, given by Aristotle:
– All men are mortal. (major premise)
– Socrates is a man. (minor premise)
– Socrates is mortal. (conclusion)

• The wheel is round. (Or, all wheels I have seen are round)
– using inductive reasoning we can infer the general proposition: All wheels
are round.
• The bird flies. (Or, all birds I have seen could fly)
– using inductive reasoning we can infer the general proposition: All birds
can fly.
 Artificial Intelligence
• The concern of AI is to develop computer-based system that
behave like human and emulate the reasoning power of humans
• In order to do tasks that require human intelligence.

– Which task requires intelligence?

– Complex arithmetic operations
– For instance, Solving 220 * 350?
– Mundane tasks: all tasks routinely done by all of us in our day-to-day
activities:
– Example, Natural language understanding; face recognition
– Expert tasks: which require specialists' knowledge
– Example, Medical diagnosis; computer maintenance; financial
planning
 Views of AI
• AI is found on the premise that:
– workings of human mind can be explained in terms of computation,
and
– computers can do the right thing given correct premises and reasoning
rules.

Views of AI fall into four categories:

Thinking humanly Thinking rationally

Acting humanly Acting rationally
 Thinking humanly: The Cognitive
Modeling
• Reasons like humans do
– Programs that behave like humans
• Requires understanding of the internal activities of the brain
– see how humans behave in certain situations and see if you
could make computers behave in that same way.
Example. write a program that plays chess.
– Instead of making the best possible chess-playing program,
you would make one that play chess like people do.
 Acting humanly: The Turing Test
Can machines act like human do? Can machines behave
intelligently?
• Turing Test: Operational test for intelligent behavior
– Do experiments on the ability to achieve human-level performance,
– Acting like humans requires AI programs to interact with people
• Suggested major components of AI: knowledge, reasoning,
language understanding, learning
 Thinking Rationally: The Laws of Thought
• A system is rational if it thinks/does the right thing through
correct reasoning.

• Aristotle: provided the correct arguments/ thought structures

that always gave correct conclusions given correct premises.
– Abebe is a man; all men are mortal; therefore, Abebe is mortal
 Acting rationally: The rational agent
• Doing the right thing so as to achieve one’s goal, given one’s
beliefs.
• AI is the study and construction of rational agents (an agent that
perceives and acts)
• Rational action requires the ability to represent knowledge and
reason with it so as to reach good decision.
– Learning for better understanding of how the world works
 Applications of AI
Solving problems that required thinking by humans:
• Playing games (chess, checker, cards, ...)
– Great advances: the AI software Deep Blue beats human expert
Kasparov.
• Classification of text (Politics, Economic, Social, Sports, etc.)
• Information filtering and summarization of text
• Writing story and poems; solving puzzles
• Giving advice in Medical diagnosis, Equipment repair, Computer
configuration, Financial planning, …
 How to make computers act like humans?
The following sub-fields are emerged
• Natural Language processing (enable computers communicate in human
language, English, Amharic, ..)
• Knowledge representation (schemes to store information, both facts and
inferences, before and during interrogation)
• Automated reasoning (use stored information to answer questions and to
draw new conclusions)
• Machine learning (adapt to new circumstances and accumulate
knowledge)
• Computer vision (recognize objects based on patterns in the same way
as the human visual system does)
• Robotics (produce mechanical device capable of controlled motion with the
ability to move, see, hear, and accordingly take actions in the world, possibly
responding to new perceptions)
 AI vs HI?
• Artificial Intelligence (or AI) is the field that explores to develop
a system that think in the same sense as humans do.
 Remember computer-based chess program (Deep Blue) that beats human
expert (Gary Kasparov). What do you understand from this?
• Is AI equals human intelligence?
– Is that possible to create a computer system called mind?
• What is our concern in designing an Intelligent agent?
– Is that to replace human beings or to support and give leverage to them
such that they can engage themselves in expert works?
 Strong AI vs Weak AI
• Strong AI argues that it is possible that one day a computer will be
invented which can be called a mind in its fullest sense.
– Strong AI aims to create an agent that can replicate humans' intelligence
completely; i.e., it can think, reason, imagine, etc., & do all the things that
are currently associated with the human brain.
• Weak AI, on the other hand, argue that computers can only appear to
think & are not actually conscious in the same way as human brains are.
– The weak AI position holds that AI should try to develop systems which
have facets of intelligence, but the objective is not to build a completely
sentient/conscious entity.
– Weak AI researchers see their contribution as systems like expert systems
used for medical diagnosis, which use "intelligent" models, but they do not
help create a conscious agent
 History of AI
• Formally initiated in 1956 and the name AI was coined by John
McCarthy.
• The advent of general-purpose computers provided a vehicle for
creating artificially intelligent entities.
– Used for solving general-purpose problems

• Which one is preferred?

– General-purpose problem-solving systems
– Domain specific systems
 History of AI…
• Development of knowledge-based systems: the key to power
– Performance of general-purpose problem-solving methods is weak for
many complex domains.
– Use knowledge more suited to make better reasoning in narrow areas
of expertise (like human experts do).
Knowledge base systems (KBSs)
• Deal with treating knowledge and ideas on a computer.
– Emphases to the importance of knowledge.
• Use inference to solve problems on a computer.
– Knowledge-based systems describes programs that reason over
extensive knowledge bases.
• Have the ability to learn ideas so that they can obtain
information from outside to use it appropriately.
– The value of the system lies in its ability to make the workings of the
human mind understandable and executable on a computer.
 History of AI…
• Shifts from procedural to declarative programming paradigm.
– Rather than telling the computer how to compute a solution, a program
consists of a knowledge base of facts and relationships.
– Rather than running a program to obtain a solution, the user asks
question so that the system searches through the KB to determine the
answer.
• Simulate human mind and learning behavior (Neural Network,
Support Vector Machine, Hidden Markov Models, etc. )
 Programming paradigms
• Each programming paradigms consists of two aspects:
– Methods for organizing data/knowledge,
– Methods for controlling the flow of computation

• Traditional paradigms:
Programs = data structure + control

• AI programming paradigms:
Programs = knowledge structure + inference
 Sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence
• AI now consists many sub-fields, using a variety of techniques, such as:
– Neural Networks – e.g. brain modeling, classification
– Computer Vision – e.g. object recognition, image understanding
– Natural Language Processing – e.g. machine translation
– Robotics – e.g. intelligent control, autonomous exploration
– Expert Systems – e.g. decision support systems, teaching systems
– Evolutionary Computation – e.g. genetic algorithms, genetic programming
– Speech Processing– e.g. speech recognition and production
– Planning – e.g. scheduling, game playing
– Machine Learning – e.g. decision tree learning