INTRODUCION TO AI
Lecture 01 and 02
Nomica Choudhry
Artificial Intelligence in the Movies
Artificial Intelligence in Real Life
A young science (≈ 50 years old)
– Exciting and dynamic field, lots of uncharted territory left
– Impressive success stories
– “Intelligent” in specialized domains
– Many application areas
Face detection Formal verification
Why the interest in AI?
Search engines
Science
Medicine/
Diagnosis
Labor
Appliances What else?
What is artificial intelligence?
• There is no clear consensus on the definition of AI
• John McCarthy coined the phrase AI in 1956
http://www.formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/whatisai.html
Q. What is artificial intelligence?
A. It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines,
especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the
similar task of using computers to understand human or other
intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that
are biologically observable.
Q. Yes, but what is intelligence?
A. Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve
goals in the world. Varying kinds and degrees of intelligence
occur in people, many animals and some machines.
What is AI? (Cont’d)
Other possible AI definitions
• AI is a collection of hard problems which can be solved by humans and
other living things, but for which we don’t have good algorithms for
solving.
– e. g., understanding spoken natural language, medical diagnosis,
circuit design, learning, self-adaptation, reasoning, chess playing,
proving math theories, etc.
• Russsell & Norvig: a program that
– Acts like human (Turing test)
– Thinks like human (human-like patterns of thinking steps)
– Acts or thinks rationally (logically, correctly)
What is the scientific method hypothesis behind AI?
One Working Definition of AI
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make
computers do things that people are better at or would be
better at if:
• they could extend what they do to a World Wide
Web-sized amount of data and
• not make mistakes.
History of AI
• AI has roots in a number of scientific disciplines
– computer science and engineering (hardware and software)
– philosophy (rules of reasoning)
– mathematics (logic, algorithms, optimization)
– cognitive science and psychology (modeling high level human/animal
thinking)
– neural science (model low level human/animal brain activity)
– linguistics
• The birth of AI (1943 – 1956)
– McCulloch and Pitts (1943): simplified mathematical model of neurons
(resting/firing states) can realize all propositional logic primitives (can
compute all Turing computable functions)
– Alan Turing: Turing machine and Turing test (1950)
– Claude Shannon: information theory; possibility of chess playing
computers
– Boole, Aristotle, Euclid (logics, syllogisms)
• Early enthusiasm (1952 – 1969)
– 1956 Dartmouth conference
John McCarthy (Lisp);
Marvin Minsky (first neural network machine);
Alan Newell and Herbert Simon (GPS);
– Emphasis on intelligent general problem solving
GSP (means-ends analysis);
Lisp (AI programming language);
Resolution by John Robinson (basis for
automatic theorem proving);
heuristic search (A*, AO*, game tree search)
• Emphasis on knowledge (1966 – 1974)
– domain specific knowledge is the key to overcome existing
difficulties
– knowledge representation (KR) paradigms
– declarative vs. procedural representation
• Knowledge-based systems (1969 – 1999)
– DENDRAL: the first knowledge intensive system (determining 3D
structures of complex chemical compounds)
– MYCIN: first rule-based expert system (containing 450 rules for
diagnosing blood infectious diseases)
EMYCIN: an ES shell
– PROSPECTOR: first knowledge-based system that made significant
profit (geological ES for mineral deposits)
• AI became an industry (1980 – 1989)
– wide applications in various domains
– commercially available tools
– AI winter
• Current trends (1990 – present)
– more realistic goals
– more practical (application oriented)
– distributed AI and intelligent software agents
– resurgence of natural computation - neural networks and emergence of
genetic algorithms – many applications
– dominance of machine learning (big apps)
AI Winter
• AI Winter – too much promised
• 1966: the failure of machine translation,
• 1970: the abandonment of connectionism,
• 1971−75: DARPA's frustration with the Speech Understanding Research program at
Carnegie Mellon University
• 1973: the large decrease in AI research in the United Kingdom in response to the
Lighthill report,
• 1973−74: DARPA's cutbacks to academic AI research in general,
• 1987: the collapse of the Lisp machine market,
• 1988: the cancellation of new spending on AI by the Strategic Computing Initiative
• 1993: expert systems slowly reaching the bottom
• 1990s: the quiet disappearance of the fifth-generation computer project's original
goals,
• AI will cause
– social ills, unemployment
– End of humanity
Weak and Strong AI Claims
• Weak AI:
– Machines can be made to act as if they
were intelligent.
• Strong AI:
– Machines that act intelligently have real,
conscious minds.
What is Intelligence?
The Turing Test
A machine can be described as a
thinking machine if it passes the
Turing Test. i.e. If a human
agent is engaged in two isolated
dialogues (connected by
teletype say); one with
a computer, and the other with
another human and the human
agent cannot reliably identify
which dialogue is with the
computer.
Intelligence
• Turing Test: A human communicates with a
computer via a teletype. If the human
can’t tell he is talking to a computer or
another human, it passes.
– Natural language processing
– knowledge representation
– automated reasoning
– machine learning
• Add vision and robotics to get the total
Turing test.
Future of AI
• Artificial intelligence is impacting
the future of virtually every industry
and every human being. Artificial
intelligence has acted as the main
driver of emerging technologies like
big data, robotics and IoT, and it will
continue to act as a technological
innovator for the foreseeable future.
The Singularity
AI questions
• What is the sicentific method hypothesis
behind AI?
• Future of AI, friend or foe
• What is the impact and role of AI on/in
information sciences
• How can AI be used in information sciences
research
• Will AI ever exceed NI?
• Will we work together?
• Human-computing collaboration (Shyam Sankar – Ted)
• Human-based computation
