Artificial Intelligence

Lecture 1
February 22, 2012

Outline

Course information
Motivations
What is Artificial Intelligence
A brief history of Artificial Intelligence
Outline of the course

Course information (1/6)

Instructor: Professor Gwoboa Horng
Basic assumption
Little is assumed of the students except a general
background in computing.
I will cover the main aspects in enough detail for the
students to understand the gist.

Course web page:

http://ailab.cs.nchu.edu.tw/course/AI/100/main.htm
Password: ailab
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Course information (2/6)

Textbook
Artificial Intelligence Illuminated
Ben Coppin,
Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc.
2004.
()
http://computerscience.jbpub.com/
catalog/0763732303/
Try Google search (keywords:
artificial intelligence illuminated)

Course information (3/6)

1. Artificial Intelligence (3rd Edition)
By E. Rich, B. Knight, and S. Nair,
McGraw-Hill, 2009.

2. Common LISP. The Language.

Second Edition
By Guy Steele
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/ht
ml/cltl/clm/clm.html

Course information (4/6)

The objective of this course is to learn fundamental
techniques of artificial intelligence.
We will cover a wide range of AI techniques, algorithms,
and methodologies, including

Searching algorithms,
Knowledge representations,
LISP,
Machine learning: neural network, and genetic algorithms,
Planning, and
Computer understanding of language and images.
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Course information (5/6)

This class is
Not a lab or programming course
But there will be (LISP) programming assignments.

Neither a math course,

But strong math background will help.

Course information (6/6)

Grading (Tentative)
Homework/Quiz 15%
Project 15% (Presentation and/or paper required)
Midterm exam 25% (Apr. 18, 2012)
Final exam 25% (June 20, 2012)
Class participation 20%

Outline

Course information
Motivations
What is Artificial Intelligence
A brief history of Artificial Intelligence
Outline of the course

Why Study Artificial Intelligence?

Gain insight into human intelligence by considering
computational models of intelligence.
Gain the ability to create programs that perform
functions normally thought to require intelligence.
Improve our own problem-solving skills by taking to
lessons learned in AI.
Work with neat technology.

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Why Study Artificial Intelligence?

Search engines
Science

Medicine/
Diagnosis
Labor

Appliances

What else?
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Why Study Artificial Intelligence?

Engineering: To get machines to do a wider variety
of useful things
e.g., understand spoken natural language, recognize
individual people in visual scenes, find the best travel plan
for your vacation, etc.

Cognitive Science: As a way to understand how

natural minds and mental phenomena work
e.g., visual perception, memory, learning, language, etc.

Philosophy: As a way to explore some basic and

interesting (and important) philosophical questions
e.g., what is consciousness, etc.
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Why Study Artificial Intelligence?

World wide web (content, commerce, community, context)
Web 1.0 World of static pages. (Read Only)
Web 2.0 Dynamic and integrated with media like sound and video.
(Read and Write)
Web 3.0 Intelligence driven + Web 2.0 + AI. (Read Write and
execute)

Web 3.0 = AI + Web 2.0

add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it
less of a catalog and more of a guide
provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion

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Outline

Course information
Motivations
What is Artificial Intelligence
A brief history of Artificial Intelligence
Outline of the course

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A paper by Turing
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Published in Mind: A Quarterly Review of
Psychology and Philosophy, in 1950.
I propose to consider the question, Can machines
think?
And if so, how?
And if not, why not?

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What is Artificial Intelligence?

A more difficult question is: What is intelligence?
This question has puzzled philosophers, biologists and
psychologists for centuries.
Intelligence has many faces, like creativity, solving
problems, pattern recognition, classification, learning,
induction, deduction, building analogies, optimization,
surviving in an environment, language processing,
knowledge, and many more.

Artificial Intelligence is easier to define, although

there is no standard, accepted definition. (next slide)
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What is Artificial Intelligence?

A simple definition might be as follows:
Artificial intelligence is the study of systems that act in a
way that to any observer would appear to be intelligent.
One definition of artificial intelligence is offered by the AAAI
-- "the scientific understanding of the mechanisms
underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their
embodiment in machines". ( http://aaai.org/AITopics/AIOverview )
In fact, Artificial Intelligence techniques are often used to
solve complex problems. This may lead us to another
definition of Artificial Intelligence, as follows:
Artificial Intelligence involves using methods based on the
intelligent behavior of humans and other animals to solve
complex problems.
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Task domains of AI
Mundane tasks
Formal tasks
Expert tasks

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Mundane Tasks
Perception
Vision
Speech

Natural Language
Understanding
Generation
Translation

Commonsense Reasoning

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Formal Tasks
Games

Chess
Checkers
Othello
Go

Mathematics

Logic
Geometry
Calculus
Proving properties of programs

Checkers is solved (Science) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5844/1518.full

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Expert Tasks
Engineering
Design
Fault Finding
Manufacturing planning

Medical
Diagnosis
Medical Image Analysis

Financial
Stock market predictions

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Key attributes
AI differs from more conventional computer science
areas in:
Viewpoint (plausible and logic reasoning instead of
qualitative calculations)
Symbolic manipulation (instead of numeric orientation)
Knowledge-based design (has a line of reasoning & can
explain itself)
Heuristic or approximate problem-solving approach

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Key attributes
AI encompasses many different areas such as:

Expert systems
Game playing
Automatic programming
Deduction and theorem proving
Knowledge representation
Search
Learning
Planning
Natural language processing
Robotics
Vision and Scene understanding
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Strong AI and Weak AI

There are two entirely different schools of Artificial
Intelligence:
Strong AI:
This is the view that a sufficiently programmed computer
would actually be intelligent and would think in the same
way that a human does.
Weak AI:
This is the use of methods modeled on intelligent behavior
to make computers more efficient at solving problems.
This course is concerned with Weak AI.
Strong AI is currently the stuff of science fiction, although
there are many that believe that machines will indeed be
capable of real thought at some point in the future.
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Strong Methods and Weak Methods

Not to be confused with Strong AI and Weak AI.
Strong methods use knowledge about the world to
solve problems.
Weak methods use logic and other symbolic systems.
Strong method systems rely on weak methods, as
knowledge is useless without a way to handle that
knowledge.
Weak methods are in no way inferior to strong methods
they simply do not employ world knowledge.
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Alan Turing and the 1950s

Alan Turing is often seen as the father of Artificial Intelligence.
He invented the Turing Test, designed to determine if a
computer system can be called an artificial intelligence or not,
based on whether it can fool a human into thinking it is human
too.
No system has yet passed the Turing Test. We will discuss the
Turing test in Lecture 2.
Around this time, in the 1950s, systems were being developed
that could play checkers, engage in conversation and solve other
problems.
The term Artificial Intelligence was coined in 1956 by John
McCarthy.
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Outline

Course information
Motivations
What is Artificial Intelligence
A brief history of Artificial Intelligence
Outline of the course

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AI History pre-Turing Test

Greek mythology: Hephaestus, idea of intelligent
robots.
15th century: da Vinci drafted robot design
16th century: the Maharal of Pragues Golem
17th century: Descartes animals are complex
machines
19th century: Charles Babbages Analytical Engine
1940s: Isaac Asimov Three Laws of Robotics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

1943: McCulloch and Pitts, model neurons

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AI history The dawn

1950 Allen Turing invented Turing test
1956 -- Newell and Simons Logic Theorist (LT)
found a shorter proof of a well known theorem in
Principia Mathematica
1956 Dartmouth conference: the term artificial
intelligence was coined by John McCarthy

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AI history The romantic period

Early enthusiasm, great expectations
1956 Samuels checker player was demonstrated on
TV, creating strong impression
1958 In MIT AI Lab memo no.1, McCarthy invented
LISP
1959 Gelernter constructed the Geometry Theorem
Prover
1965 Robinson discovered the resolution method

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Continued in the next slide.

AI history The romantic period

1963 Slagles SAINT program (closed form
integration problems)
1967 Bobrows STUDENT program (algebra story
problems)
1968 Evans ANALOGY (geometric analogy
problems)
1968 Raphaels SIR (semantic information retrieval,
questions and answers in restricted subset of English)

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Continued in the next slide.

AI history The romantic period

Early successes in many areas:
Natural language STUDENT (1967), SHRDLU (1972)
Knowledge representation semantic network (1968),
frame (1975), conceptual dependencies and script (1977),
production systems
Search techniques (heuristics)
Vision constraint propagation
Neural network and learning
Planning Fahlmans planner (1974)

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AI history a dose of reality

Big promises, great expectations, all fell short
Methods that worked well for simple examples turned
to fail on wider applications and more difficult
problem. Why?
Early programs were knowledge poor (the best known
example is ELIZA program)
Combinatorial explosion and intractability (scaling up
was once widely thought as simply a matter of faster
hardware and larger memories)
The fact that a program can find a solution in principle does
not mean that the program contains any of the mechanisms
needed to find it in practice
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AI history awakening
Old methods of relying on general-purpose search
mechanism have been called weak methods.
The new approach: knowledge is power!
The expert system era:
MYCIN
PROSPECTOR (1979) successfully found a site containing
a large molybdenum deposit
New area of research: knowledge engineering, uncertainty
reasoning

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AI history booming industry

1982 R1, the first successful commercial ES that saved DEC
about $40 million a year
1981 Japan launched the 5th generation project to build
intelligent computers
MCC was found in the US to counter the Japanese project
Funding reinstated
LMI, TI, Symbolics, and Xerox built LISP machines
Nearly every major US corporation had its own AI group
The AI industry went from a few million in sales in 1980 to $2
billion in 1988
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AI history crude reality, again

Many corporations and research groups found that
building a successful expert system involved much
more than simply buying a reasoning system and
filling it with rules
Support for AI research and business quickly
shrinking
1987 - LMI (Lisp Machines Inc.) declared bankruptcy
1991 5th generation project declared a failure
1993 Symbolics declared bankruptcy
Another AI winter
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AI history - recap

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Continued in the next slide.

AI history - recap
The 1950s to the 1990s
During this time, the optimism of the 1950s was
replaced with realism.
Artificial Intelligence replaced as its goal the building
of an intelligent robot with the goal of using
heuristics and other techniques to solve complex
problems.

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AI history late 90s

1997 - The Deep Blue chess program beats the
current world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.
Web crawlers and other AI-based information
extraction programs become essential in widespread
use of the world-wide-web.

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AI history

st
21

century

200x - Interactive robot pets (a.k.a. "smart toys")

become commercially available.
Sony AIBO (Artificial Intelligence roBOt)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIBO
PLEOrb (a dinosaur robot )

2011 IBM Watson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)

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AI history current status

See AI in the news for history in the making!
http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/current.html

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AI history current status

The dream is still there, but no more unrealistic
expectations
Return to well founded and existing theories
Hardware improvement improves speech recognition,
chess programs, computer vision, and robotics
http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/siri.html

More work on real-world problems rather than

microworlds
AI techniques will proved to be viable in well defined
and limited area. Domain knowledge is the key.
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Outlook for AI
AI has a long way to go.
It may well be 100 years before any computer is as intelligent as a
human.

No single discovery will suffice.

Real AI will require hundreds of research breakthrough.

AI will continue to advance.

Progress will continue but no sudden and final success

Useful applications of AI are feasible now.

AI can enhance human performance.
The best overall system will often be a combination of AI programs
and humans.
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AI in the 21st Century

AI is everywhere.
Fuzzy logic is used in elevators, washing machines
and cars.
Intelligent agents are used in many software
applications.
Robots explore other worlds, and toy robots play
with children (and some adults).
Expert systems diagnose diseases and recommend
remedies.
Computer games use AI.
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Outline

Course information
Motivations
What is Artificial Intelligence
A brief history of Artificial Intelligence
Outline of the course

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Outline of the course

Part 1: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Chapter 1: A Brief History of AI
Chapter 2: Artificial Intelligence: Uses and Limitations
Chapter 3: Knowledge Representation

Lisp
Part 2: Search
Chapter 4: Search Methodologies
Chapter 5: Advanced Search
Chapter 6: Game Playing

Part 3: Logic
Chapter 7: Propositional and Predicate Logic
Chapter 8: Inference and Resolution for Problem Solving
Chapter 9: Rules and Expert Systems

Midterm Exam
Continued in the next slide.

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Outline of the course (Cont.)

Part 4: Machine Learning

Chapter 10: Introduction to Machine Learning

Chapter 11: Neural Networks
Chapter 12: Probabilistic Reasoning and Bayesian Belief Networks
Chapter 13: Artificial Life: Learning through Emergent Behavior
Chapter 14: Genetic Algorithms

Part 5: Planning
Chapter 15: Introduction to Planning
Chapter 16: Planning Methods

Part 6: Advanced Topics

Chapter 17: Advanced Knowledge Representation

Chapter 18: Fuzzy Reasoning
Chapter 19: Intelligent Agents
Chapter 20: Understanding Language
Chapter 21: Machine Vision

Final Exam

If time
permitted

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Questions?

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