INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Chapter 1
CAP 492 Course
Dr. Souham Meshoul
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Several attempts to understand how do minds work for thousands of years.
 Goal of Artificial Intelligence: Not only to understand how does mind work? but
also how to build intelligent entities?.
Engineering:
Scientific:
- solve real-world problems using knowledge and reasoning
- develop concepts, theory and practice of building intelligent entities
- Emphasis on system building
- use computers as a platform for studying intelligence itself
- Emphasis on understanding intelligent behavior.
 Artificial Intelligence is one of the newest sciences which emerged after the world
war II. AI represents a big and open field.
 The name Artificial Intelligence was adopted for the first time in 1956.
 Artificial Intelligence can be viewed as a universal field: Ho to automate
intellectual tasks?
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 What is artificial Intelligence?
Several definitions are available in the literature.
Thinking VS Behavior
Model humans VS Work from an ideal standard
 Two points of views:
1. Thinking/Acting humanly: success is measured in term of fidelity to human
performance.
2. Thinking/Acting rationally: success is measured using an ideal concept of
intelligence called Rationality.
 Rational System = system which does the « right thing » given what it knows.
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Some AI Definitions:
 According to thought processes and reasoning
Thinking like humans:
« The exciting new effort to make computers think…machines with minds, in the full
and literal sense. » (Haugeland, 1985).
« The automation of activities that we associate with human thinking, activities such as
decision-making, problem solving, learning… » (bellman, 1978).
Thinking rationally:
« The study of mental faculties through the use of computational models. » (Charniak
and Mcdermott, 1985).
« The study of the computations that make it possible to perceive, reason and act. »
(Winston 1992).
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Dr. Souham Meshoul
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Some AI Definitions:
 According to behavior
Acting Humanly
« The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence
when performed by people. » (Kurzweil, 1990)
« The study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment,
people are better. » (Rich and Knight, 1991)
Acting rationally
« Computational intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent agents. »
(Poole et al.,1998).
« AI…is concerned with intelligent behavior in artifacts. » (Nilsson, 1998).
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Some other definitions
• Weak AI: (Searle) AI develops useful, powerful applications
• Strong AI: claims machines have cognitive minds comparable to
humans
debates on strong AI bring up some difficult conceptual problems in
philosophy..
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Acting Humanly
Turing Test: Alan Turing 1950 « Computing Machinery and Intelligence »
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Test: The computer passes the “test of intelligence” if a human, after posing
some written questions, cannot tell whether the responses were from a
person or not.
 Provides an operational definition of AI.
 Still being used today within the AI community in annual competitions –
the Loebner Prize ($100,000 and a true 18K gold medal)
To give an answer, the computer would need to posses some capabilities:
 Natural language processing: To communicate successfully.
 Knowledge representation: To store what it knows or hears.
 Automated reasoning: to answer questions and draw conclusions using
stored information.
 Machine learning: To adapt to new circumstances and to detect and
extrapolate patterns.
 Computer vision: To perceive objects.
 Robotics to manipulate objects and move.
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Example: ELIZA program, some extracts from the test:
• Patient: Men are all alike.
• ELIZA: In what way?
• Patient: They are always bugging about something or the other.
• ELIZA: Can you think of a specific example?
• Patient: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
• ELIZA: Your boyfriend made you come here?
• Patient: He says I’m depressed much of the time.
• ELIZA: I am sorry you are depressed.
Problems:
 ELIZA and similar programs stressed simple syntactic analysis and generation of
sentences. They used pattern matching with known sentences.
 Turing’s test is not reproducible or amenable to mathematical analysis (it suggests
duplicate an examplar).
 An alternative: Study the underlying principles of intelligence (Wright brothers)
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Thinking Humanly:
Program think like human → How humans think?
Requires Scientific theories of internal activities of the brain (cognitive
science and cognitive neuroscience).
Example:
 The General Problem Solver (GPS designed by Newell and Simon In 1963) was
meant to be a program that simulated human thought.
 GPS: used means-end analysis in its search for solutions, computing the difference
between the goal and current, and then attempting to minimize the difference.
 Newell and Simon by comparing GPS traces with those of human subjects
discovered that the behavior of GPS was largely a subset of human behavior
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Thinking rationally:
The Laws of Thought approach is based on pattern for argument structure
arising from Aristostle’s syllogisms.
Example, “Socrates is a man; all men are mortal, therefore
mortal.” The laws of thought initiated the field of logic.
Socrates is
The formal logic movement was advanced by Peano, Boole, Frege,, Godell
and others (late 1800’s and early 1900’s)
Inspired perhaps by early progress, Hibert became a proponent of a school of
thought known as logicism or formalism. The goal of this was to devise a
logic, or formal system, capable of deriving all mathematical theorems.
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Acting rationally:
Modern AI can be characterized as the engineering of rational agents.
An agent is simply an entity that perceives and acts. A rational agent is
an entity that perceives, reasons and acts rationally (correctly).
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Foundations:
– An interdisciplinary subject found on:
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•
•
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Philosophy,
mathematics,
economics,
neuroscience,
psychology,
computer engineering,
linguistics, and so on
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 History of Artificial Intelligence
Big dream
 Ultimately, we are dealing with the question: “What are we (human beings)
doing when we are thinking?”
 Thought processes in the human mind are computational in nature. There
are mechanistic procedures for generating these thoughts.
 Such computations can be simulated and implemented by a Turing
machine. Therefore, it can be programmed.
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 History of Artificial Intelligence
Early days (1943-1955)
 1943: first piece of AI work: Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts
 Model of artificial neurons
 Mathematical learnable functions that generate “on/off” depending on inputs
(logic gates)
 Any computable function can be computed by a network of connected neurons.
 Suitably defined networks can learn.
 1949: Hebbian learning
 A mechanism for updating the connection strength of a neuron.
 Today, neurologists have confirmed that something similar to Hebbian learning
indeed is going on in our brain when we are learning.
 1950: Turing test, complete vision of AI in “computing machinery and Intelligence”
 1951: first neural network computer
 Implemented by M. Minsky and D. Edmonds
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 History of Artificial Intelligence
Early days (1943-1955): Mcculloch and pitts artificial neuron
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 History of Artificial Intelligence
Birth of AI 1956
 1956: Dartmouth Conference
 Organized by John McCarthy and colleagues for starting a new area in studying
computation and intelligence.
 John McCarthy introduced the term “artificial intelligence” in the conference.
 The next 20 years witnessed steady growth of the field led by the pioneers appeared
in the Dartmouth conference.
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 History
of Artificial Intelligence
Expectations and Initial enthusiasm (1952 – 1969)
1956: Samuel’s checkers program:
First game playing program achieving human-competitive
performance.
1957: Simon’s general problem solver (GPS):
Imitates the way a human would solve planning problems.
1958: Invention of LISP by J. McCarthy.
The first AI programming language.
1958: Minsky’s microworlds
The concept of creating a “controlled environment” in which
problem solving appears to require intelligence was born. The study
of computation and intelligence can become more manageable in
these micro-worlds
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Dr. Souham Meshoul
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 History
of Artificial Intelligence
Expectations and Initial enthusiasm (1952 – 1969)
1963: Thomas Evan’s program ANALOG
Solved analogy problems in an IQ test.
1965: ELIZA
Simulates a dialog with a computer in English on any topic.
Became popular when programmed to simulate a psychotherapist
(Fedora’s Emacs).
1967: Dendral program (developed at Stanford)
First successful program for scientific reasoning – one of the earlier rule
based expert systems. A program that can infer molecular structures
given the information provided by a mass spectrometer (that gives the
masses of the various fragments of a molecule). The program relies on
expert knowledge (encoded as rules) to constraint the generation of
possible molecular structures that are consistent with the information
from the mass spectrometer
CAP 492 Course
Dr. Souham Meshoul
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 History of Artificial Intelligence
Reality Check (1966 – 1973): series of disappointments and frustrations
AI was poured little buckets of “reality cold water”
Problems
 Most early systems contain little or no knowledge of their subject matter
– Knowledge acquisition bottleneck.
– Example: Poor performance of earlier machine translation system (Russian 
English): “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” was translated to “the
vodka is good but the meat is rotten”.
 Computational Intractability of AI problems
 Theory of computational complexity was not developed. Polynomial solvable
problems, NP-completeness, etc
 People thought a faster machine could solve any hard problem.
 Initial frustration with theorem proving led to a disappointment in AI
Theorem proving is a exponential in complexity
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 History of Artificial Intelligence
Resurgence (1969 – 1979)
 1971: T. Winograd’s Ph.D. thesis (MIT) demonstrated a system that can
understand English in a micro-domain (the block world).
 1972: PROLOG was developed by a group of Europeans and became
alternative to LISP as an AI programming language.
 1974: MYCIN was developed by Ted Shortliffe. Expert system for medical
diagnosis. Sometimes called the first expert system.
 1978: The Version Space algorithm was developed by Tom Mitchell at
Stanford. First symbolic machine learning algorithm. “Father of Machine
Learning”.
 1979: Non-monotonic logic. Began to be formalized by John McCarthy and
his colleagues.
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Dr. Souham Meshoul
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 History of Artificial Intelligence
Resurgence (1969 – 1979): Winograd 1972
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 History of Artificial Intelligence
AI becomes an industry (1980 – present)
 AI started to become industrially and commercially beneficial
– 1982: R1 was deployed at DEC – an expert system that saved the company
around $40M / year
– Du Pont had 100 in use and an estimated 500 in development at late 90’s to
early 21st century
 At an international level, AI was considered a part of a country’s
technological developments
– Japan: “First Generation” project (10 year plan to build intelligence machines
running in Prolog)
– USA: Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) was
formed in response
– Britain: Funding for AI was reinstated
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Dr. Souham Meshoul
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 History of Artificial Intelligence
Renewing with connectionism and AI becomes a science (1986 – present)
 Work of the physicist John Hopfield (1982) on using techniques from
statistical mechanics.
 Connectionist models of intelligent systems competitor to the symbolic
models (Newell and Simon) and logicist approach (McCarthy).
(complementary approaches in fact).
 Several revolutions in many fields: pattern recognition, computer vision,
robotics…
 Emergence of intelligent agents.
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Examples of AI applications: Game Playing
 TDGammon, the world champion backgammon player, built by Gerry Tesauro of IBM
research.
Perception: keyboard input.
Reason: reinforcement learning.
Actuation: graphical output shows dice and movement of piece.
 Deep Blue chess program beat world champion Gary Kasparov
Perception: input symptoms and test results.
Reason: Bayesian networks, Monte-Carlo simulations.
Actuation: output diagnoses and further test suggestions.
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Examples of AI applications: Natural Language Understanding
 Natural language understanding (spell checkers, grammar checkers)
 AI translators – spoken to and prints what one wants in foreign languages :
Alta Vista’s translation of web pages.
 Advanced systems can answer questions based on the information in the
text and produce useful summaries.
 PROVERB (Littman 1999) crossword puzzles
 Examples of successes : English conversation
START system: accesses raw data tables, and then can carry on a dialogue
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Examples of AI applications: Expert systems
 In geology
prospector expert system carries evaluation of mineral potential of
geological site or region
 Diagnostic Systems
Pathfinder, a medical diagnosis system (suggests tests and makes
diagnosis) developed by Heckerman and other Microsoft research
Microsoft Office Assistant in Office provides customized help by
decision-theoretic reasoning by an individual user.
MYCIN system for diagnosing bacterial infections of the blood and
suggesting treatments
 System Configuration
"XCON" (for custom hardware configuration) configures computers
doing work of 300 people using 10,000 rules
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Examples of AI applications: Robotics
 Robotics becoming increasing important in various areas like: games, to
handle hazardous conditions and to do tedious jobs among other things.
 Examples: automated cars, ping pong player, mining, construction, robot
assistant in microsurgery,…
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Main issues in AI
 Representation
 Search: many tasks can be viewed as searching a very large problem space
for solution space
 Inference: related to search, inferring other facts from some given facts.
e.g., knowing all “elephants have trunks” and “Jo is an elephant,” can we
answer does Jo have a trunk?
 Learning: inductive inference, neural networks, artificial life, genetic
algorithms, evolutionary strategies
 Planning: starting with general facts about the world, facts about the effects
of basic actions, facts about a particular situation, and a statement of a goal,
generate a strategy for achieving that goal in terms of a sequence of
primitive steps or actions
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INTRODUCTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Summary
 Intelligence is studied from many perspectives: Are you concerned with
thinking or behavior?
 AI can help us solve difficult, real-world problems, creating new
opportunities in business, engineering, and many other application areas.
 The history of AI has had cycles of success, misplaced optimism, and
resulting cutbacks in enthusiasm and funding. There have also been cycles
of introducing new creative approaches and systematically refining the best
ones.
 AI has advanced more rapidly in the past decade because of greater use of
the scientific method in experimenting with and comparing approaches.
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