THE FOUNDATIONS OF

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Philosophy (428 B.C.-present)

Mathematics (c. 800-present)
Psychology (1879-present)
Computer engineering (1940present)
Linguistics (1957-present)

Philosophy (428 B.C.-present)

PLATO
428 B.C.

His writings range across politics, mathematics,

physics, astronomy, and several branches of
philosophy.
Together, Plato, his teacher Socrates, and his
student Aristotle laid the foundation for much of
western thought and culture.

HUBERT DREYFUS
450 B.C
Says that "The story of artificial intelligence
might well

Dualism
Materialism
Empiricist
Induction

DUALISM
The position that mental phenomena are, in
some respects, non-physical, or that the mind
and body are not identical.

MATERIALISM
Which holds that all the world (including the
brain and mind) operate according to physical
law

WILHELM LEIBNIZ (1646-1716)

Was probably

the first to take the materialist position to its

logical conclusion and build a mechanical device
intended to carry out mental operations.
His formulation of logic was so weak that his
mechanical concept generator could not
produce interesting results.

EMPIRICIST
a philosophical belief that states your knowledge
of the world is based on your experiences,
particularly your sensory experiences.

INDUCTION
Was proposed by Treatise of Human Nature
(Hume, 1978)
Operation of the mind selecting among what
appear to be the possible courses of action.
They remain "possible" because the brain does
not have access to its own future states .

LOGICAL POSITIVISM
OBSERVATION SENTENCES
CONFIRMATION THEORY
MEANS-ENDS ANALYSIS

LOGICAL POSITIVISM
This theory was introduced Bertrand Russell
(1872-1970).
This doctrine holds that all knowledge can be
characterized by logical, theories, connected .

CONFIRMATION THEORY
Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel attempted to
establish the nature of the connection between
the observation sentences and the more general
theoriesin other words, to understand how
knowledge can be acquired from experience.
What form should this connection take, and how
can particular actions be justified?

These questions are vital to AI, because only by

understanding how actions are justified can we
understand how to build an agent whose actions
are justifiable, or rational .

MEANS-ENDS ANALYSIS
Typified by the following kind of common-sense
argument.
It is useful, but does not say what to do when
several actions will achieve the goal, or when no
action will completely achieve it.

Mathematics (c. 800-present)

ALGORITHM
Philosophers staked out most of the important
ideas of ArtificiaI Intelligence. The notion of
expressing a computation as a formal algorithm
goes back to al-Khowarazmi, an Arab
mathematician of the ninth century, whose
writings also introduced Europe to Arabic
numerals and algebra.

INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM
Showed that in any language expressive
enough to describe the properties of the natural
numbers, there are true statements that are
undecidable: their truth cannot be established by
any algorithm.

INTRACTABILITY
is a controversial concept, which means
different things to different people.

REDUCTION
refers to the rewriting of an expression into a
simpler form.
a thing that is made smaller or less in size or
amount, in particular.

NP-COMPLETENESS

the set of all decision problems whose solutions

can be verified in polynomial time.

DECISION THEORY
the mathematical study of strategies for optimal
decision-making between options involving
different risks or expectations of gain or loss
depending on the outcome.

Psychology (1879-present)

BEHAVIORISM
John Watson(1878-1958) aid Edward Lee
Thorndike (1874-1949) rebelled against this
subjectivism, rejecting any theory involving
mental processes on the grounds that
introspection could not provide reliable
evidence.

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
is the study of mental processes such as
"attention, language use, memory, perception,
problem solving, creativity, and thinking."

Computer engineering (1940present)

FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO

SUCCEED, WE NEED TWO THINGS:
Intelligence
Artifact

Linguistics (1957-present)

KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION
is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated
to representing information about the world in a
form that a computer system can utilize to solve
complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical
condition or having a dialog in a natural
language.

COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
is the study of computer processing,
understanding, and generation of human
languages. It is often regarded as a subfield of
artificial intelligence.