ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Unit-1
Introduction: Chapter 1
Text Book: Stuart Russell, Norvig
 Outline
• Course overview
• What is AI?
• A brief history
• The state of the art
 What Is AI?
• Artificial Intelligence is the branch of computer
science concerned with making computers behave like
humans.

Major AI textbooks define artificial intelligence as "the

study and design of intelligent agents," where an
intelligent agent is a system that perceives its
environment and takes actions which maximize its
chances of success.
John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it
as "the science and engineering of making intelligent
machines, especially intelligent computer programs."
 What is AI?
• The definitions of AI according to some text books are categorized into
four approaches and are summarized in the table below :
Thought+ reasoning

Systems that think like humans Systems that think rationally

“The exciting new effort to make “The study of mental faculties through the
computers think … machines with use of computer models.”
minds,in the full and literal (Charniak and McDermont,1985)
sense.”(Haugeland,1985)

Systems that act like humans Systems that act rationally

The art of creating machines that “Computational intelligence is the study of
perform functions that require the design of intelligent agents.”(Poole et
intelligence when performed by al.,1998)
people.”(Kurzweil,1990)

behaviour
 Acting humanly: Turing Test

• Turing test by Alan turing (1950)

• The computer is asked questions by a human interrogator.
• The computer passes the test if a human interrogator, after posing some written questions , cannot
tell whether the written responses come from a person or not.
• Programming a computer to pass ,the computer 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
conclusions.
– Machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate patterns

To pass the complete Turing Test, the computer will need

– Computer vision to perceive the objects ,and
– Robotics to manipulate objects and move about.
Thinking humanly: cognitive modeling
Thinking humanly : The cognitive modeling approach
We need to get inside actual working of the human mind :
1)through introspection – trying to capture our own thoughts as
they go by;
2) through psychological experiments:-
• Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who developed GPS, the
“General Problem Solver” tried to trace the reasoning steps
to traces of human subjects solving the same problems.
• The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science brings together
computer models from AI and experimental techniques from
psychology to try to construct precise and testable theories of
the workings of the human mind.
 Thinking rationally: "laws of thought"
• Thinking rationally : The “laws of thought approach” The Greek
philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to attempt to codify “right
thinking”, reasoning processes. His syllogism 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 a field called logic.
• Two main obstacles:
• 1)not easy to take informal knowledge and state in formal terms
required by logical notations
• 2)big difference in solving the problem “in principle” and in practice.
 Acting rationally: rational agent
• An agent is something that acts. Computer agents are not mere programs ,but
they are expected to have the following attributes also :
(a) operating under autonomous control
(b) perceiving their environment
(c) persisting over a prolonged time period,
(d) adapting to change.
• A rational agent is one that acts so as to achieve the best outcome. 
• Finally which approach??
• “laws of thought” approach to AI emphasis on correct inferences, but making
correct inferences is part of being rational agent. But we can act rationally without
involving inferences.
So the study of AI as a rational agent design has two advantages:-
• 1)it is more general than the “laws of thought” approach
• 2)It is more amenable to scientific development than are approaches based on
human behavior or thought.
 Rational agents
• An agent is an entity that perceives and acts
• This course is about designing rational agents
• Abstractly, an agent is a function from percept histories to
actions:
[f: P*  A]
• Caveat: computational limitations make perfect rationality
unachievable
 design best program for given machine resources
–
• For any given class of environments and tasks,
we seek the agent (or class of agents) with the
best performance
•
 AI prehistory
• Philosophy Logic, methods of reasoning, mind as physical
system foundations of learning, language,
rationality
• Mathematics Formal representation and proof algorithms,
computation, (un)decidability, (in)tractability,
probability
• Economics utility, decision theory
• Neuroscience physical substrate for mental activity
• Psychology phenomena of perception and motor control,
experimental techniques
• Computer building fast computers
engineering
• Control theory design systems that maximize an objective
function over time
• Linguistics knowledge representation, grammar
 Abridged history of AI
• 1943 McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain
• 1950 Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
• 1956 Dartmouth meeting: "Artificial Intelligence" adopted
• 1952—69 Look, Ma, no hands!
• 1950s Early AI programs, including Samuel's checkers
program, Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist,
Gelernter's Geometry Engine
• 1965 Robinson's complete algorithm for logical reasoning
• 1966—73 AI discovers computational complexity
Neural network research almost disappears
• 1969—79 Early development of knowledge-based systems
• 1980-- AI becomes an industry
• 1986-- Neural networks return to popularity
• 1987-- AI becomes a science
• 1995-- The emergence of intelligent agents
 State of the art
• Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Garry
Kasparov in 1997
• Proved a mathematical conjecture (Robbins conjecture)
unsolved for decades
• No hands across America (driving autonomously 98% of the
time from Pittsburgh to San Diego)
• During the 1991 Gulf War, US forces deployed an AI logistics
planning and scheduling program that involved up to 50,000
vehicles, cargo, and people
• NASA's on-board autonomous planning program controlled
the scheduling of operations for a spacecraft
• Proverb solves crossword puzzles better than most humans
 Go through…
• https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/

Important questions..
What is AI?Discuss the four approaches to AI in
detail.