Introduction to artificial intelligence

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Lecture 1: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

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What is AI?
• The branch of computer science called Artificial Intelligence
is said to have been born at a conference held at
Dartmouth, USA, in 1956
• The scientists attending that conference represented several
different disciplines: mathematics, neurology,
psychology, electrical engineering, etc
• They had one thing in common:
They all were trying to use the recently developed
computers to simulate various aspects of human
intelligence

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What is AI?
• Artificial Intelligence may be defined as the branch of
computer science that is concerned with the
automation of intelligent behavior
• An exact definition of intelligence is not easy to formulate
• However, there are some general abilities which are
universally considered as intelligent

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What is AI?
According to Douglas Hofstadter these are:
- To respond to situations very flexibly
If the same response is exhibited each time, the behavior
is called mechanical.
To survive in changing environments, one need to exhibit
innovative behavior (e.g. art of begging)
- To make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages
We understand such messages because our knowledge
and experience allows us to place them in context.
(e.g. time flies like an arrow, buy this washing powder
versus buy that washing powder)

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What is AI?
- To recognize the relative importance of different elements
of a situation
(e.g. quality versus price of a commodity)
- To find similarities between situations despite differences
which may separate them
(e.g. chairs in two different pictures)
- To draw distinctions between situations despite similarities
which may link them
(e.g. differences in two cars)
These abilities are largely due to knowledge and experience,
which allows you to place an information in its wider context

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What is AI?
Another definition of intelligence:
It is the ability to
- perceive inter-relationship of facts
- learn and understand from experience
- acquire and retain knowledge
- respond quickly and successfully to a new
situation

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What is AI?
Turing test was proposed in 1950.
It is a test to decide whether or not a particular
machine is intelligent.
Predicted that by 2000, a machine might have a 30%
chance of fooling a lay person for 5 minutes

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What is AI?
- Contact only through monitor and keyboard
- Machine tries to pose as a human
- If the player cannot distinguish between human and
machine, then machine is considered intelligent
Revised Turing Test: A human converses with an unseen
respondent and attempts to determine whether it is a
man or machine. If the computer fools you into
thinking that it is a human, than that machine is
intelligent

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What is AI?
Sometimes it is possible to program computers to carry on
shallow conversations, in limited areas, and thus fool
unsuspecting humans into believing that they are
addressing other humans.
Example: Program ELIZA simulating a psychiatrist.
Person: I miss my children
ELIZA: “Why do you miss your children?”
or “ Tell me more about your family”
ELIZA is programmed to ask pre-determined questions
and parrot segments of your responses back to you.
Hence Turing test may not be such a good judge of
machine intelligence after all

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What is AI?
This leads us to the issue of “understanding”
Even though a machine may be exhibiting intelligent
behaviour, it does not “understands” what it is doing
Searle’s Chinese Room Example
Strong and Weak AI

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Major AI Areas
1. Expert Systems
An ES is a computer program designed to act as an expert in a
particular domain (area of expertise). It typically includes a sizeable
knowledge base, consisting of facts about the domain and rules
for application to those facts. Medical (e.g. PXDES, MYCIN)
and Agriculture (e.g. AGREX)
2. Natural Language Processing
Goal is to enable people and computers to communicate in
ordinary or natural English.
- Comprehension of natural language:
Keyboard input (e.g. MS Word Processor), speech
recognition (e.g. IBM VoiceType Dictation , BBN
corporation: voice activated browsers, speaker
identification for security and Operetta™)
- Generation of natural language.

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Major AI Areas
3. Machine learning
Field of study that gives computer the ability to learn without
being explicitly programmed (Arthur Samuel, 1956)
ML learning provides best methods for
developing particular kinds of software, in
applications where:
1. Application is too much
complex for people to manually
design the algorithm. For instance,
soft- wares for sensor-based
prediction tasks such as speech
recognition and computer vision.

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Major AI Areas
3. Machine learning
Field of study that gives computer the ability to learn without
being explicitly programmed (Arthur Samuel, 1956)
ML learning provides best methods for
developing particular kinds of software, in
applications where:
2. Applications require that the
software customize to its operational
environment after it is fielded. For
example, speech recognition system
that customize to the user who purchase
the software or recommenders

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Major AI Areas
4. Robotics and Computer Vision
Factory automation
Autonomous vehicles
Robots: Electromechanical devices programmed to
perform manual tasks. Not all robots are
intelligent. Some are pre-programmed by
conventional techniques and are dumb. An
intelligent robot usually includes some kind of
sensory apparatus that allows it to respond to
changes in its environment.
Computer Vision: it is field that include methods for
acquiring, processing, analyzing and understanding
images in order to produce numerical and symbolic
information. For example, medical image processing
is an application of computer vision