Chapter One

Introduction To AI
 Big questions

• Can machines think?

• And if so, how?
• And if not, why not?
• And what does this say about human beings?
• And what does this say about the mind?
 What is artificial intelligence?
• There are no clear consensus on the definition of AI
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 intelligence, but AI
does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically
observable.
B. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the part of computer science
concerned with designing intelligent computer systems, that is,
systems that exhibit characteristics we associate with intelligence
in human behavior – understanding language, learning,
reasoning, solving problems, and so on.
 What is artificial intelligence?
Q. 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.
B. Intelligence is the capability of observing, learning,
remembering and reasoning.
AI attempts to develop intelligent agents

Characteristics of Intelligent system

• Use vast amount of knowledge
• Learn from experience and adopt to changing
environment
• Interact with human using language and speech
• Respond in real time
• Tolerate error and ambiguity in communication
 Human Intelligence
How do people Reason?
 They create categories
 They use specific rules
– if ‘a’ then ’b’
if ‘b’ then ‘c’
abc
 They use Heuristics - “Rule of thumb”
 They use Past Experience – “CASES”
- Similarities of current and previous case
- Store cases using key attributes
 They Use “Expectations”
How does our brain work when we solve a problem?
Do we think it over and suddenly find an answer?
What do we do when solving a complicated factorization problem, a
puzzle or a mystery?
 Artificial Intelligence
• AI is the branch of Computer Science that deals with
ways of:
– representing knowledge using symbol rather than numeric
value and with rule-of-thumb and method of processing
information

• AI is the effort to develop computer based system that

behave as human.
–Such system should be able to learn Natural Language.
–Able to do text processing, communicate in natural language
and speech
 Views of AI
• AI is found on the premise that:
– workings of human mind can be explained in terms of
computation, and
– computers can do the right thing given correct premises and
reasoning rules.
Views of AI fall into four categories:

Human
Rationality
performance

Thought process
and reasoning

Behavior
 Views of AI
Like
humans Well

GPS Rational
Think agents

Heuristic
Act Eliza
systems
 Thinking humanly: The Cognitive Modeling
Like
humans Well

• Reasons like humans do Think GPS Rational

agents
– Programs that behave like humans

• Requires understanding of the internal Act Eliza Heuristic

systems
activities of the brain
– see how humans behave in certain situations and see if you could make
computers behave in that same way.
• GPS (General Problem Solver): Goal not just to produce humanlike
behavior (like ELIZA), but to produce a sequence of steps of the
reasoning process that was similar to the steps followed by a person
in solving the same task.
• AI is the automation of activities that we associate with human
thinking, activities like decision making, problem solving, learning…
Example. write a program that plays chess.
– Instead of making the best possible chess-playing program, you
would make one that play chess like people do.
 Acting humanly: The Turing Test Like
humans Well
Can machines act like human do?
Think Rational
Can machines behave intelligently? GPS
agents

• Turing Test: Operational test for

Heuristic
Act Eliza
intelligent behavior systems

– do experiments on the ability to achieve human-level

performance,
– Acting like humans requires AI programs to interact with people
• Behaviorist approach.
• Not interested in how you get results, just the similarity to
what human results are.
 Thinking Rationally: The Laws of Thought
Like
humans Well
• A system is rational if it thinks/does
Think Rational
the right thing through correct reasoning. GPS
agents

• AI is the study of mental faculties through Heuristic

Act Eliza
systems
the use of computational models.
– Develop formal models of knowledge representation, reasoning,
learning, memory, problem solving, that can be rendered in
algorithms.
• Aristotle: provided the correct arguments/ thought
structures that always gave correct conclusions given
correct premises.
– Abebe is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Abebe is mortal
– These Laws of thought governed the operation of the mind and
initiated the field of Logic.
 Acting rationally: The rational agent
Like
• Doing the right thing so as to achieve humans Well

one’s goal, given one’s beliefs. Think GPS Rational

agents
– The right thing is that which is expected
to maximize goal achievement, Eliza Heuristic
Act systems
given the available information.
• AI is the study and construction of rational agents (an
agent that perceives and acts)
• Rational action requires the ability to represent
knowledge and reason with it so as to reach good
decision.
– Learning for better understanding of how the world works
 Possible Approaches
Like
humans Well

GPS Rational
Think agents
AI tends to
work mostly
in this area
Heuristic
Act Eliza
systems
 Turing Test
• “ Can machines think?”  “can machines behave intelligently?”
• The operational test for the intelligence behavior: the imitation game

• Three rooms contain a person, a computer, and an interrogator.

• The interrogator can communicate with the other two by teleprinter.
• The interrogator tries to determine which is the person and which is the
machine.
• The machine tries to fool the interrogator into believing that it is the
person.
• If the machine succeeds, then we conclude that the machine can think.
 Foundations of AI
•Artificial Intelligence has identifiable roots in a number of older
disciplines, particularly: (provides ideas, view points & techniques)

Computer
Science &
Mathematics Engineering Philosophy

Economics
AI Biology

Psychology Linguistics
Cognitive
Science
Foundation …
 History of AI

• Formally initiated in 1956 and the name AI was coined

by John McCarthy.
• The advent of general purpose computers provided a
vehicle for creating artificially intelligent entities.
– Used for solving general-purpose problems

• Which one is preferred?

– General purpose problem solving systems
– Domain specific systems
 History of AI
• Development of knowledge-based systems: the key to
power
– Performance of general-purpose problem solving methods is
weak for many complex domains.
– Use knowledge more suited to make better reasoning in
narrow areas of expertise (like human experts do).
– Early knowledge intensive systems include:
• The Dendral program (1969): solved the problem of inferring
molecular structure (C6H13NO2).
• MYCIN (1976): used for medical diagnosis.
• etc.
 History of AI
• Shifts from procedural to declarative programming
paradigm.
– Rather than telling the computer how to compute a
solution, a program consists of a knowledge base of facts
and relationships.
– Rather than running a program to obtain a solution, the
user asks question so that the system searches through the
KB to determine the answer.
• Simulate human mind and learning behavior (Neural
Network, Belief Network, Hidden Markov Models,
etc. )
Applications of AI and KBS
Solving problems that required thinking by humans:
• Playing games (chess, checker, cards, ...)
• Proving theorems (mathematical theorems, laws of
physics, …)
• Classification of text (Politics, Economic, sports, etc,)
• Writing story and poems; solving puzzles
• Giving advice in medicine, law, … (diagnosing
diseases, consultation, …)
How to make computers act like humans?
The following sub-fields are emerged
• Natural Language processing (enable computers
communicate in human language, English, Amharic, ..)
• Knowledge representation (schemes to store information,
both facts and inferences, before and during interrogation)
• Automated reasoning (use stored information to answer questions and
to draw new conclusions)
• Machine learning (adapt to new circumstances and accumulate
knowledge)
• Computer vision (recognize objects based on patterns in the
same way as the human visual system does)
• Robotics (produce mechanical device capable of controlled motion;
which enable computers to see, hear & take actions)

• Is AI equals human intelligence ?

 Programming paradigms
• Each programming paradigms consists of two aspects:
– Methods for organizing data/knowledge,
– Methods for controlling the flow of computation

• Traditional paradigms:
Programs = data structure + algorithm

• AI programming paradigms:
Programs = knowledge structure + inference mechanism
 Sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence
• AI now consists many sub-fields, using a variety of techniques,
such as:
– Neural Networks – e.g. brain modeling, time series prediction, classification
– Evolutionary Computation – e.g. genetic algorithms, genetic programming
– Vision – e.g. object recognition, image understanding
– Robotics – e.g. intelligent control, autonomous exploration
– Expert Systems – e.g. decision support systems, teaching systems
– Speech Processing– e.g. speech recognition and production
– Natural Language Processing – e.g. machine translation
– Planning – e.g. scheduling, game playing
– Machine Learning – e.g. decision tree learning, version space learning
• Most of these have both engineering and scientific aspects.
 Computer Science VS Artificial
Intelligence
• Computer Science
– Methods for applying computers to problems
– Study of the fundamental limits of computation
• Artificial Intelligence
– Methods for applying computers to problems that require
“intelligence”
– Study of the fundamental limits of “intelligent” behavior by
computers
 Assignment 1
1. Read and list out the contribution of various disciplines to
the foundation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to exist as a
science?
2. What are the potted history of AI? Read more about the
technological evolution related to AI (state of the art)
3. Read about the following topics
– Computer Vision
– Robotics
– Expert Systems (knowledge based systems)
– Natural Language Processing
– Knowledge representation (knowledge management)
– Machine Learning
– Neural Networks
4. What an AI system can and cannot do?
 Artificial intelligence-basic questions
1. What is artificial intelligence?
2. What is intelligence?
3. Isn't there a solid definition of intelligence that doesn't
depend on relating it to human intelligence? .
4. Is intelligence a single thing so that one can ask a yes or no
question ``Is this machine intelligent or not?''?
5. Isn't AI about simulating human intelligence?
6. What about IQ? Do computer programs have IQs?
7. What about other comparisons between human and
computer intelligence?
8. When did AI research start ?
9. Does AI aim to put the human mind into the computer?
10. What is the Turing test?
 Artificial intelligence-basic questions
11. Does AI aim at human-level intelligence?
12. How far is AI from reaching human-level intelligence? When
will it happen?
13. Are computers the right kind of machine to be made
intelligent?
14. Are computers fast enough to be intelligent?
15. What about parallel machines?
16. What about making a ``child machine'' that could improve by
reading and by learning from Experience
17. Might an AI system be able to bootstrap itself to higher and
higher level intelligence by thinking about AI?
18. What about chess?
19. Don't some people say that AI is a bad idea?
 What can AI systems do
Here are some example applications
• Computer vision: face recognition from a large set
• Robotics: autonomous (mostly) automobile
• Natural language processing: simple machine translation
• Expert systems: medical diagnosis in a narrow domain
• Spoken language systems: ~1000 word continuous speech
• Planning and scheduling: Hubble Telescope experiments
• Learning: text categorization into ~1000 topics
• User modeling: Bayesian reasoning in Windows help (the
infamous paper clip…)
• Games: Grand Master level in chess (world champion),
checkers, etc.
 What can’t AI systems do yet?
• Understand natural language robustly (e.g., read and
understand articles in a newspaper)
• Surf the web
• Interpret an arbitrary visual scene
• Learn a natural language
• Play Go well
• Construct plans in dynamic real-time domains
• Refocus attention in complex environments
• Perform life-long learning