Artificial Intelligence

What is AI?
• Artificial Intelligence is the study of how to make
computers do things at which at the moment
people do better.

• It is the science and engineering of making

intelligent machines, especially intelligent
computer programs.

• The term AI was first introduced by John

McCarthy in 1960.
 What is Intelligence?
• There is not yet any formal definition of
intelligence.
• 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.
• We cannot yet characterize in general what kinds
of computational procedures we want to call
intelligent.
 Why AI?
There are several limitations of human intelligence (HI).

• Unreliable: The quality and quantity of HI varies from time to

time, space to space due to physical and mental exertion of
human beings.
• Limited Applications: Te HI cannot be always employed due to
cost and lack of expertise or non availability of expertise at
particular time or geographical position.
• Speed: The speed with which HI is able to react to situations
to exhibit intelligence is much slower than the AI systems.
• Failure proof: HI is not failure proof but AI system has only
hardware failure which is rare.
AI – compromise between the versatility and limitations of
natural intelligence.
 AI Approaches
• Discipline that systematizes and automates
reasoning processes to create machines that:

Think like humans Think rationally

Act like humans Act rationally

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 Think like humans Think rationally
Act like humans Act rationally

• The goal of AI is: to build machines that operate in

the same way that humans think
– How do humans think?
– Build machines according to theory, test how behavior
matches mind’s behavior
– Cognitive Science
• Manipulation of symbolic knowledge

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 Think like humans Think rationally
Act like humans Act rationally
• The goal of AI is: to build machines that perform tasks that
seem to require intelligence when performed by humans

• Take a task at which people are better, e.g.:

– Prove a theorem
– Play chess
– Plan a surgical operation
– Diagnose a disease
– Navigate in a building

• and build a computer system that does it automatically

• But do we want to duplicate human imperfections?
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 Think like humans Think rationally
Act like humans Act rationally

• The goal of AI is: to build machines that make the

“best” decisions given current knowledge and
resources

• “Best” depending on some utility function

– Influences from economics, control theory

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 Type of Tasks
• Task 1: Computers outperform human beings: data storing
and retrieval, calculations, making large number of copies.
The general feature of this kind is the routine jobs that
requires minimum amount of intelligence.

• Task 2: Human beings outperform computers: solving

ambiguity, finding similarities among dissimilarities and vice
versa, making sense of relative importance, intuition, i.e.,
finding the solution to a problem only by feeling and
without any reasoning (the sixth sense).

• AI – Building machines which can perform task 2 as well.

 Features of Intelligence
• Handling incomplete data: Getting complete information
from incomplete data.
• Handling contradictory data: Making sense from data
having contradiction and ambiguity.
• Handling uncertain data: Making sense from fuzzy or
uncertain data.
• Handling heuristics: An intelligent system should be able to
search or think heuristically. Heuristic is some rules to guide
the search in the most probable direction.
• Ability to learn: An intelligent system has the ability to learn
and slowly grow the knowledge base of the system.
 Can Machines Think?
• Turing Test (Turing, 1950)

Computer to be tested

Interrogator

Human
 Branches of AI
Logical AI: What a program knows about the world in general the facts of
the specific situation in which it must act, and its goals are all
represented by sentences of some mathematical logical language.
Search: AI programs often examine large numbers of possibilities, e.g.
moves in a chess game or inferences by a theorem proving program.
Discoveries are continually made about how to do this more efficiently
in various domains.
Pattern recognition: When a program makes observations of some kind, it
is often programmed to compare what it sees with a pattern. For
example, a vision program may try to match a pattern of eyes and a
nose in a scene in order to find a face.
Representation: Facts about the world have to be represented in some
way. Usually languages of mathematical logic are used.
Inference: From some facts, others can be inferred. Mathematical logical
deduction is adequate for some purposes, but new methods of non-
monotonic inference have been added to logic since the 1970s.
 Branches of AI (Contd.)
Common sense knowledge and reasoning: This is the area in which AI
is farthest from human-level, in spite of the fact that it has been an
active research area since the 1950s.
Learning from experience: Programs do that. The approaches to AI
based on connectionism and neural nets specialize in that.
Planning: Planning programs start with general facts about the world
(especially facts about the effects of actions), facts about the
particular situation and a statement of a goal. From these, they
generate a strategy for achieving the goal. In the most common
cases, the strategy is just a sequence of actions.
Heuristics: A heuristic is a way of trying to discover something or an
idea imbedded in a program. Heuristic functions are used in some
approaches to search to measure how far a node in a search tree
seems to be from a goal
 Applications of AI
• Game playing
• Speech recognition
• Understanding natural language
• Computer vision
• Expert systems
• Heuristic classification

And many more …

 This Course
• Search Techniques

• Knowledge representation

• Uncertainty Reasoning

• Machine Learning

• Lab: PROLOG