Intorduction to

Artificial Intelligence
Prof. Dechter
ICS 270A
Winter 2003
Course Outline
 Classoom: ICS2-144
 Days: Tuesday & Thursday
 Time: 09:30 a.m. - 10:50 a.m.
 Instructor: Rina Dechter
 Textbooks
 Nils Nilsson,
"Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis",
Morgan Kauffmann, 1998
 S. Russell and P. Norvig,
"Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach"
(Second Edition), Prentice Hall, 1995
 J. Pearl, "Heuristics: Intelligent Search
Stratagies", Addison-Wesley, 1984.
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Course Outline
Assignments:
 There will be weekly homework-assignments, a project, a
midterm and/or a final.

Course-Grade:
 Homeworks plus project will account for 50% of the grade,
midterm and/or final 50% of the grade.

Course Overview
 Topics covered Include: Heuristic search, Adverserial
search, Constraint Satisfaction Problems, knowledge
representation, propositional and first order logic, inference
with logic, Planning, learning and probabilistic reasoning.

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 Course Outline
Week Topic Date  
Week Introduction and overview: What is AI? History 7-Jan
1
Nillson Ch.1 (1.1-1.5), RN: chapters 1,2.
Problem solving: Statement of Search problems: state space graph,
problem types, examples (puzzle problem, n-queen, the road map,
travelling sales-man.)
Nillson Ch 7. RN: chapter 3, Pearl: ch.1
Week Uninformed search: Greedy search, breadth-first, depth-first, iterative 14-Jan
2 deepening, bidirectional search.
Nillson Ch. 8, RN: Ch. 3, Pearl: 2.1, 2.2
Informed heuristic search: Best-First, Uniform cost, A*, Branch and
bound.
Nillson Ch. 9, RN: Ch. 4 , Pearl, 2.3.1
Week Properties of A*, iterative deepening A*, generating heuristics automatically. 28-Jan
3 Learning heuristic functions.
Nillson Ch. 9, 10.3, RN: chapter 4, Pearl: 3.1, 3.2.1, 4.1, 4.2
Game playing: minimax search, alpha-Beta pruning. 270a- winter 2003

Nillson Ch. 12, RN: Ch. 6.

Course Outline
Week 4 Constraint satisfaction problems 21-Jan
Definitions, examples, constraint-graph, constraint propagation
(arc-consistency, path-consistency), the minimal network.
Reading: RN: Ch. 5, class notes.
Backtracking and variable-elimination
advanced search: forward-checking, Dynamic variable
orderings, backjumping, solving trees, adaptive-consistency.
Reading: RN: Ch. 5, class notes.
Week 5 Knowledge and Reasoning: Propositional logic, syntax, 4-Feb
semantics, inference rules.
Nillson Ch. 13, RN: Ch 7.
Propositional logic. Inference, First order logic
Nillson Ch. 14, RN: Ch. 7
Week 6 Knowledge representation: 11-Feb
First-order (predicate) Logic.
Nillson Ch. 15, RN: Ch. 9.
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Course Outline

Week 7 Inference in First Order logic 18-Feb

Nillson Ch. 16, RN: Ch. 9
Planning:
Logic-based planning, the situation calculus, the frame
problem.
Nillson Ch. 21, RN: Ch. 11.
Week 8 Planning: Planning systems, STRIP, regression planning, 25-Feb
current trends in planning: search-based, and
propositional-based.
Nillson Ch. 22, RN: Ch. 11.
Week 9 Reasoning and planning under uncertainty 4-Mar
Nillson Ch. 19, RN: chapter 14.
Week 10 Assorted topics 11-Mar
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Course Outline
Resources on the Internet
 AI on the Web: A very comprehensive list of Web
resources about AI from the Russell and Norvig
textbook.

Essays and Papers

 What is AI, John McCarthy
 Rethinking Artificial Intelligence, Patrick H. Winston
 International Summer School on AI Planning
 An overview of recent algorithms for AI planning, Jussi
Rintanen

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Today’s class
 What is Artificial Intelligence?
 Engineering versus cognitive approaches
 Intelligent agents
 History of AI
 Real-World Applications of AI
 many products, systems, have AI
components

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What is Artificial
Intelligence?
 Thought processes vs behavior
 Human-like vs rational-like
 RN figure:
 “How to simulate humans intellect and
behavior on by a machine.
 Mathematical problems (puzzles, games,
theorems)
 Common-sense reasoning
 Expert knowledge: lawyers, medicine, diagnosis
 Social behavior

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What is Artificial Intelligence
 Thought processes
 “The exciting new effort to make computers
think .. Machines with minds, in the full and
literal sense” (Haugeland, 1985)
 Behavior
 “The study of how to make computers do
things at which, at the moment, people are
better.” (Rich, and Knight, 1991)

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The Turing Test

 Requires
 Natural language
 Knowledge representation
 Automated reasoning
 Machine learning (vision, robotics)

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Acting humanly
 Turing test (1950)
 Requires:
 Natural language
 Knowledge representation
 automated reasoning
 machine learning
 (vision, robotics.) for full test
 Thinking humanly:
 Introspection, the general problem solver (Newell and
Simon 1961)
 Cognitive sciences
 Thinking rationally:
 Logic
 Problems: how to represent and reason in a domain
 Acting rationally: 270a- winter 2003

 Agents: Perceive and act

 AI examples
Common sense reasoning
 Tweety
 Yale Shooting problem
Update vs revise knowledge
 The OR gate example: A or B - C
 Observe C=0, vs Do C=0

Chaining theories of actions

Looks-like(P)  is(P)
Make-looks-like(P)  Looks-like(P)
----------------------------------------
Makes-looks-like(P) ---is(P) ???
Garage-door example: garage door not included.
 Planning benchmarks
 8-puzzle, 8-queen, block world, grid-space world
 (Nillson Fig 1.2)

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History of AI
 McCulloch and Pitts (1943)
 Neural networks that learn
 Minsky (1951)
 Built a neural net computer
 Darmouth conference (1956):
 McCarthy, Minsky, Newell, Simon met,
 Logic theorist (LT)- proves a theorem in Principia Mathematica-Russel.
 The name “Artficial Intelligence” was coined.
 1952-1969
 GPS- Newell and Simon
 Geometry theorem prover - Gelernter (1959)
 Samuel Checkers that learns (1952)
 McCarthy - Lisp (1958), Advice Taker, Robinson’s resolution
 Microworlds: Integration, block-worlds.
 1962- the perceptron convergence (Rosenblatt)

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 History, continued
 1966-1974 a dose of reality
 Problems with computation
 1969-1979 Knowledge-based systems
 Weak vs. strong methods
 Expert systems:
• Dendral:Inferring molecular structures
• Mycin: diagnosing blood infections
• Prospector: recomending exploratory drilling (Duda).
 Roger Shank: no syntax only semantics
 1980-1988: AI becomes am industry
 R1: Mcdermott, 1982, order configurations of computer systems
 1981: Fifth generation
 1986-present: return to neural networks
 Recent event:
 Hidden markov models, planning, belief network
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What’s involved in Intelligence?
Intelligent agents
 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

 Knowledge Representation, 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

 we are continuously learning and adapting
 our internal models are always being “updated”
• e.g. a baby learning to categorize and recogniz animals

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Implementing an Agent

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Implementing agents
 Table look-ups
 Autonomy
 All actions are completely specified
 no need in sensing, no autonomy
 example: Monkey and the banana
 Structure of an agent
 agent = architecture + program
 Agent types
• medical diagnosis
• Satellite image analysis system
• part-picking robot
• Interactive English tutor
• cooking agent
• taxi driver

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Agent types
 Example: Taxi driver
 Simple reflex
 If car-in-front-is-breaking then initiate-breaking
 Agents that keep track of the world
 If car-in-front-is-breaking and on fwy then initiate-breaking
 needs internal state
 goal-based
 If car-in-front-is-breaking and needs to get to hospital then go to
adjacent lane and plan
 search and planning
 utility-based
 If car-in-front-is-breaking and on fwy and needs to get to hospital
alive then search of a way to get to the hospital that will make your
passengers happy.
 Needs utility function that map a state to a real function (am I happy?)

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AI Application: Reasoning
 Scheduling:
 Nasa Space telescope
 factory scheduling
 class scheduling
 Puzzle solving
 Chess
 Checkers
 Backgamon
 Speech recognition
 Vision
 Diagnosis
 Medical
 Circuit diagnosis
 Health care consulting
 Decision support systems

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 Summary of State of AI Systems , 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

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Summary
 What is Artificial Intelligence?
 modeling humans thinking, acting, should think, should
act.
 History of AI
 Intelligent agents
 We want to build agents that act rationally

 Real-World Applications of AI
 AI is alive and well in various “every day” applications
• many products, systems, have AI components
 Assigned Reading
 Chapter 1, Nillson
 Chapters 1 and 2 in the text R&N

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