Introduction to AI

History of AI
1943: early beginnings

McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain

1950: Turing

Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence

1956: birth of AI

Dartmouth meeting: "Artificial Intelligence name adopted

1950s: initial promise

Early AI programs, including

Samuel's checkers program
Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist

1955-65: great enthusiasm

Newell and Simon: GPS, general problem solver

Gelertner: Geometry Theorem Prover
McCarthy: invention of LISP

History of AI

196673: Reality dawns

Realization that many AI problems are intractable

Limitations of existing neural network methods identified
Neural network research almost disappears

196985: Adding domain knowledge

Development of knowledge-based systems

Success of rule-based expert systems,
E.g., DENDRAL, MYCIN
But were brittle and did not scale well in practice

1986-- Rise of machine learning

Neural networks return to popularity

Major advances in machine learning algorithms and applications

1990-- Role of uncertainty

Bayesian networks as a knowledge representation framework

1995-- AI as Science

Integration of learning, reasoning, knowledge representation

AI methods used in vision, language, data mining, etc

Foundations of AI
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/Statistics modeling uncertainty, learning
from data
Economics
utility, decision theory, rational economic
agents
Neuroscience neurons as information processing units.

Foundations of AI
Psychology/
how do people behave, perceive, process
cognitive
Cognitive Science information, represent knowledge.
Computer building fast computers
engineering
Control theory design systems that maximize an objective
function over time
Linguisticsknowledge representation, grammars

Components of AI
Research in AI has focussed on the following
components of intelligence:
learning,
reasoning,
problem-solving,
perception, and
language-understanding.

Learning
Distinguished in number of forms
Simplest one is trial-and-error
Eg: solving mate-in-one chess problem
simple memorising of individual items--solutions to problems,
words of vocabulary, etc.--is known as rote learning.
More challenging is the problem of implementing what is
called generalisation.
Learning that involves generalisation leaves the learner able to
perform better in situations not previously encountered.
Eg. Program to learn Past tense of English verb
Sophisticated modern techniques enable programs to
generalise complex rules from data.

Reasoning
To reason is to draw inferences appropriate to the situation in
hand.
Inferences are classified as either deductive or inductive.
In deductive case, the truth of the premises guarantees the
truth of the conclusion
eg:- Fish is either in the sea or the aquarium; it isn't in the sea; so it's
in the aquarium

in the inductive case, the truth of the premise lends support to

the conclusion but nevertheless further investigation might
reveal that, despite the truth of the premise, the conclusion is
in fact false.
eg:- "Previous accidents just like this one have been caused by
instrument failure; so probably this one was caused by instrument
failure".

Problem-Solving
Problems have the general form: given such-and-such data, find x.
For eg: finding winning moves in board games; identifying
people from their photographs; and planning series of movements
that enable a robot to carry out a given task.
Problem-solving methods divide into special-purpose and
general-purpose.
A special-purpose method is tailor-made for a particular problem,
and often exploits very specific features of the situation in which
the problem is embedded.
A general-purpose method is applicable to a wide range of
different problems.
means-end analysis, which involves the step-by-step reduction of the
difference between the current state and the goal state.
The program selects actions from a list of means
Eg: simple robot

Perception
In perception the environment is scanned by means of various
sense-organs, real or artificial, and processes internal to the
perceiver analyse the scene into objects and their features and
relationships.
the same object may present many different appearances on
different occasions, depending on the angle from which it is
viewed, whether or not parts of it are projecting shadows, and so
forth.
Eg:- a self-controlled car-like device to drive at moderate speeds
on the open road, and a mobile robot to roam through a suite of
busy offices searching for and clearing away empty soda cans.

Language understanding
A language is a system of signs having meaning by convention.
Traffic signs, for example, form a mini-language, it being a matter
of convention that, for example, the hazard-ahead sign means
hazard ahead.
This meaning-by-convention that is distinctive of language is very
different from what is called natural meaning, exemplified in
statements like 'The fall in pressure means the valve is
malfunctioning'.
A productive language is one that is rich enough to enable an
unlimited number of different sentences to be formulated within
it.

Sub-areas of AI

Knowledge representation and reasoning

Theorem proving
Game playing
Decision making with uncertainty
Logic
Computer vision
Robotics
Natural Language processing

Computer Vision
Computer vision is a field that includes
methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing,
and understanding images and, in general,
high-dimensional data from the real world in
order to produce numerical or symbolic
information, e.g., in the forms of decisions

Robotics
Robotics is
the
branch
of mechanical
engineering, electricalengineering and comput
er science that deals with the design,
construction, operation, and application
of robots, as well as computer systems for
their control, sensory feedback, and
information processing.

Natural Language Processing

Natural language
processing(NLP) is a field
ofcomputer science,artificial
intelligence, andcomputational
linguisticsconcerned with the
interactions betweencomputersand
human (natural) languages.