AI Notes

Unit 1
Definition of AI

It is a branch of Computer Science that pursues creating the computers or machines as intelligent as human
beings.
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
Definition: Artificial Intelligence is the study of how to make computers do things, which, at the moment, people
do better.
According to the father of Artificial Intelligence, John McCarthy, it is “The science and engineering of making
intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs”.
Artificial Intelligence is a way of making a computer, a computer-controlled robot, or a software think
intelligently, in the similar manner the intelligent humans think.
AI is accomplished by studying how human brain thinks and how humans learn, decide, and work while trying to
solve a problem, and then using the outcomes of this study as a basis of developing intelligent software and
systems.
It has gained prominence recently due, in part, to big data, or the increase in speed, size and variety of data
businesses are now collecting. AI can perform tasks such as identifying patterns in the data more efficiently than
humans, enabling businesses to gain more insight out of their data.
From a business perspective AI is a set of very powerful tools, and methodologies for using those tools to solve
business problems.
From a programming perspective, AI includes the study of symbolic programming, problem solving, and search.

What is AI ?
Artificial Intelligence is concerned with the design of intelligence in an artificial device.
The term was coined by McCarthy in 1956.
There are two ideas in the definition.
1. Intelligence
2. Artificial device

What is intelligence?
– Is it that which characterize humans? Or is there an absolute standard of judgment?
– Accordingly there are two possibilities:
– A system with intelligence is expected to behave as intelligently as a human
– A system with intelligence is expected to behave in the best possible manner
– Secondly what type of behavior are we talking about?
– Are we looking at the thought process or reasoning ability of the system?
– Or are we only interested in the final manifestations of the system in terms of its actions?

Given this scenario different interpretations have been used by different researchers as defining the scope and
view of Artificial Intelligence.
 1. One view is that artificial intelligence is about designing systems that are as intelligent as humans. This
view involves trying to understand human thought and an effort to build machines that emulate the human
thought process. This view is the cognitive science approach to AI.

2. The second approach is best embodied by the concept of the Turing Test. Turing held that in future
computers can be programmed to acquire abilities rivaling human intelligence. As part of his argument
Turing put forward the idea of an 'imitation game', in which a human being and a computer would be
interrogated under conditions where the interrogator would not know which was which, the
communication being entirely by textual messages. Turing argued that if the interrogator could not
distinguish them by questioning, then it would be unreasonable not to call the computer intelligent.
Turing's 'imitation game' is now usually called 'the Turing test' for intelligence.

Turing Test
Consider the following setting. There are two rooms, A and B. One of the rooms contains a computer. The other
contains a human. The interrogator is outside and does not know which one is a computer. He can ask questions
through a teletype and receives answers from both A and B. The interrogator needs to identify whether A or B are
humans. To pass the Turing test, the machine has to fool the interrogator into believing that it is human. For more
details on the Turing test visit the site http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~asaygin/tt/ttest.html

3. Logic and laws of thought deals with studies of ideal or rational thought process and inference. The emphasis in
this case is on the inferencing mechanism, and its properties. That is how the system arrives at a conclusion, or the
reasoning behind its selection of actions is very important in this point of view. The soundness and completeness
of the inference mechanisms are important here.
4. The fourth view of AI is that it is the study of rational agents. This view deals with building machines that act
rationally. The focus is on how the system acts and performs, and not so much on the reasoning process. A
rational agent is one that acts rationally, that is, is in the best possible manner.

Typical AI problems

While studying the typical range of tasks that we might expect an “intelligent entity” to perform, we need to
consider both “common-place” tasks as well as expert tasks.
Examples of common-place tasks include
– Recognizing people, objects.
– Communicating (through natural language).
– Navigating around obstacles on the streets

These tasks are done matter of factly and routinely by people and some other animals.
Expert tasks include:
• Medical diagnosis.
• Mathematical problem solving
• Playing games like chess

These tasks cannot be done by all people, and can only be performed by skilled specialists.
Now, which of these tasks are easy and which ones are hard? Clearly tasks of the first type are easy for humans to
perform, and almost all are able to master them. The second range of tasks requires skill development and/or
intelligence and only some specialists can perform them well. However, when we look at what computer systems
have been able to achieve to date, we see that their achievements include performing sophisticated tasks like
medical diagnosis, performing symbolic integration, proving theorems and playing chess.

On the other hand it has proved to be very hard to make computer systems perform many routine tasks that all
humans and a lot of animals can do. Examples of such tasks include navigating our way without running into
things, catching prey and avoiding predators. Humans and animals are also capable of interpreting complex
sensory information. We are able to recognize objects and people from the visual image that we receive. We are
also able to perform complex social functions.

Intelligence does not imply perfect understanding; every intelligent being has limited perception, memory and
computation. Many points on the spectrum of intelligence versus cost are viable, from insects to humans. AI seeks
to understand the computations required from intelligent behaviour and to produce computer systems that exhibit
intelligence. Aspects of intelligence studied by AI include perception, communicational using human languages,
reasoning, planning, learning and memory.
The following questions are to be considered before we can step forward:
1. What are the underlying assumptions about intelligence?
2. What kinds of techniques will be useful for solving AI problems?
3. At what level human intelligence can be modelled?
4. When will it be realized when an intelligent program has been built?

Intelligent behavior
This discussion brings us back to the question of what constitutes intelligent behavior. Some of these tasks and
applications are:
􀂃 Perception involving image recognition and computer vision
􀂃 Reasoning
􀂃 Learning
􀂃 Understanding language involving natural language processing, speech processing
􀂃 Solving problems
􀂃 Robotics

1.1.3 Practical Impact of AI

AI components are embedded in numerous devices e.g. in copy machines for automatic correction of operation
for copy quality improvement. AI systems are in everyday use for identifying credit card fraud, for advising
doctors, for recognizing speech and in helping complex planning tasks. Then there are intelligent tutoring systems
that provide students with personalized attention Thus AI has increased understanding of the nature of intelligence
and found many applications. It has helped in the understanding of human reasoning, and of the nature of
intelligence. It has also helped us understand the complexity of modeling human reasoning.

1.1.4 Approaches to AI
Strong AI aims to build machines that can truly reason and solve problems. These machines should be self aware
and their overall intellectual ability needs to be indistinguishable from that of a human being. Excessive optimism
in the 1950s and 1960s concerning strong AI has given way to an appreciation of the extreme difficulty of the
problem.
Strong AI maintains that suitably programmed machines are capable of cognitive mental states.

Weak AI: deals with the creation of some form of computer-based artificial intelligence that cannot truly reason
and solve problems, but can act as if it were intelligent. Weak AI holds that suitably programmed machines can
simulate human cognition.

Applied AI: aims to produce commercially viable "smart" systems such as, for example, a security system that is
able to recognise the faces of people who are permitted to enter a particular building. Applied AI has already
enjoyed considerable success.

Cognitive AI: computers are used to test theories about how the human mind works--for example, theories about
how we recognise faces and other objects, or about how we solve abstract problems.
1.1.5 Limits of AI Today
Today’s successful AI systems operate in well-defined domains and employ narrow, specialized knowledge.
Common sense knowledge is needed to function in complex, open-ended worlds. Such a system also needs to
understand unconstrained natural language. However these capabilities are not yet fully present in today’s
intelligent systems.

What can AI systems do

Today’s AI systems have been able to achieve limited success in some of these tasks.
• In Computer vision, the systems are capable of face recognition
• In Robotics, we have been able to make vehicles that are mostly autonomous.
• In Natural language processing, we have systems that are capable of simple machine translation.
• Today’s Expert systems can carry out medical diagnosis in a narrow domain
• Speech understanding systems are capable of recognizing several thousand words continuous speech
• Planning and scheduling systems had been employed in scheduling experiments with the Hubble Telescope.
• The Learning systems are capable of doing text categorization into about a 1000 topics
• In Games, AI systems can play at the Grand Master level in chess (world champion), checkers, etc.

What can AI systems NOT 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
• Construct plans in dynamic real-time domains
• Exhibit true autonomy and intelligence

History of AI

To save costs or optimize processes, companies are increasingly dependent on using artificial intelligence. For
many people, AI has become a fixture in their own homes: In their casual interaction with Siri, Alexa or a number
of chatbots, people use intelligent robots to make their everyday lives easier. We owe the fact that the technology
is now ubiquitous and accessible for everybody to a number of pioneers, scientists and companies.

1950: Turing Test

Developed by the mathematician Alan Turing, the test finds out whether a machine's ability to think is equivalent
to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. In the course of AI research, this concept became a key guideline.
In this test, humans are in a dialog with a partner via computer screen and keyboard and have to find out from the
questions and answers whether their partner is a human or a machine. According to Turing, this eliminates
physical characteristics such as voice or appearance, and the test persons can concentrate exclusively on the
intelligence of the partner.

1955: The term 'Artificial Intelligence'

The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was coined in 1955. The US-American computer scientist John McCarthy first
used this term in an application for funding for the first conference on artificial intelligence at Dartmouth College.
Ten participants came to the conference to discuss how machines could be made to use language or solve
problems in the same way as humans.

1966: Eliza the chatbotELIZA

Eliza is presumably one of the first chatbots. It simulates a psychotherapist. Its communication is based on a
thesaurus, which it searches for synonyms or umbrella terms for the sentences entered via keyboard. The user
quickly realizes that they are communicating with a machine, but Eliza is still considered an early implementation
of the Turing test. Click here to communicate with Eliza.

1970s to 1980s: AI winter

After the boom of the early research projects, no new softwares and AI programs were developed in the 70s and
80s.

1997: Deep Blue

Deep Blue, the IBM chess computer, won a tournament of six games against the then world chess champion Garri
Kasparov – one year before, the computer had still lost against him. All over the world, the victory of Deep Blue
caused anxiety and fear that machines would prevail over humans in the near future.

2011: Siri
Apple gave its iPhone 4s an intelligent language-based assistant: Siri. The software recognizes and processes
natural language and can thus act as a personal assistant. Siri provides answers and executes commands which the
user speaks instead of entering them via the keyboard. To call it up, the user holds the Home button pressed or
says “Hey, Siri”. Siri operates based on previous “experiences”, i.e. it recognizes patterns in repeated entries made
by the users and constantly improves its performance using machine learning.

2011: Watson
The so-called Supercomputer Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, became famous all over the
world when it won the US-American quiz show Jeopardy against two human competitors. Watson answers
questions in natural spoken language. The server room for the vast amount of hardware and data storage space
required to accommodate the machine was so big it could hold ten refrigerators.

2014: Alexa
Amazon Echo
With Amazon’s Alexa, another intelligent language-based assistant is invited into the kitchens, living rooms and
bedrooms of many people. Contrary to the language-based assistants of a smartphone, Alexa needs to be plugged
into a socket and reacts only when addresses with “Alexa”. Privacy advocates criticize users’ carelessness in
dealing with the digital assistant, as well as the permanent storage of the spoken commands in the Amazon cloud.
Amazon counters that the spoken commands entered can be deleted, but that the existing data is required for
improving the system.

2016: Tay
Microsoft starts the chatbot Tay on Twitter – and is forced to take it offline again after only 16 hours by reason of
racist and sexist language. Tay was adaptive and supposed to become increasingly intelligent the more it
communicated with humans. Microsoft later apologized for not having foreseen the misuse. They plan to
reactivate Tay when they can be sure it will act in conformity with Microsoft’s principles and values.

2017: AlphaGO
Go-Boardgame
Developed by Google, the program AlphaGO beat the world’s best go player Ke Jie after having won against Lee
Sedol in the previous year. Since the game of go is much more complex than chess, it had been considered
impossible to master for a computer. Other than the chess computer Deep Blue, which analysis all moves to
identify the optimum one, AlphaGo learns like a human being: The software was provided with the data of
millions of moves by human players and played millions of games against itself. During this process, the system
took note of which moves brought the win. In terms of its significance for the development of AI, the victory of
AlphaGo is compared to the match between Kasparov and Deep Blue.

2018: EU guidelines for AI

The EU Commission met with representatives from science, industry, and society to discuss the topic of ethics in
artificial intelligence, and for the first time it specified guidelines. In reaction to questions regarding how to deal
with AI, the German Federal Government set up a data ethics commission which is independent of the EU.

Technology keeps developing at an increasing speed. As can be seen from Siri and its mates, it has long ceased to
be an abstract concept but has turned into a tool accessible by everybody. Also the attitude towards the intelligent
machine has changed: Today, the fear of being overpowered by a machine has widely been replaced by a
fascination for the huge potential of AI. This is probably because practically all of us carry an artificial
intelligence device in their coat pockets and use it us to communicates with the AI, and because the AI will in all
probability help us with our daily affairs also in future. But nevertheless there are certain concerns in handling
artificial intelligence, and some people are quite worried about it. Some healthy skepticism is certainly
appropriate to keep us aware of the negative sides of this development, and to define ethical principles for the
artificial intelligence.
Applications of AI
AI has applications in all fields of human study, such as finance and economics, environmental engineering,
chemistry, computer science, and so on. Some of the applications of AI are listed below:
 Perception
■ Machine vision
■ Speech understanding
■ Touch ( tactile or haptic) sensation
 Robotics
 Natural Language Processing
■ Natural Language Understanding
■ Speech Understanding
■ Language Generation
■ Machine Translation
 Planning
 Expert Systems
 Machine Learning
 Theorem Proving
 Symbolic Mathematics
 Game Playing

AI Technique:
Artificial Intelligence research during the last three decades has concluded that Intelligence requires knowledge.
To compensate overwhelming quality, knowledge possesses less desirable properties.
A. It is huge.
B. It is difficult to characterize correctly.
C. It is constantly varying.
D. It differs from data by being organized in a way that corresponds to its application.
E. It is complicated.

An AI technique is a method that exploits knowledge that is represented so that:

 The knowledge captures generalizations that share properties, are grouped together, rather than being allowed
separate representation.
 It can be understood by people who must provide it—even though for many programs bulk of the data comes
automatically from readings.
 In many AI domains, how the people understand the same people must supply the knowledge to a program.
 It can be easily modified to correct errors and reflect changes in real conditions.
 It can be widely used even if it is incomplete or inaccurate.
 It can be used to help overcome its own sheer bulk by helping to narrow the range of possibilities that must be
usually considered.
In order to characterize an AI technique let us consider initially OXO or tic-tac-toe and use a series of different
approaches to play the game.
The programs increase in complexity, their use of generalizations, the clarity of their knowledge and the
extensibility of their approach. In this way they move towards being representations of AI techniques.

Example-1: Tic-Tac-Toe
1.1 The first approach (simple)
The Tic-Tac-Toe game consists of a nine element vector called BOARD; it represents the numbers 1 to 9 in three
rows.
An element contains the value 0 for blank, 1 for X and 2 for O. A MOVETABLE vector consists of 19,683
elements (39) and is needed where each element is a nine element vector. The contents of the vector are especially
chosen to help the algorithm.
The algorithm makes moves by pursuing the following:
1. View the vector as a ternary number. Convert it to a decimal number.
2. Use the decimal number as an index in MOVETABLE and access the vector.
3. Set BOARD to this vector indicating how the board looks after the move. This approach is capable in time but
it has several disadvantages. It takes more space and requires stunning effort to calculate the decimal numbers.
This method is specific to this game and cannot be completed.

1.2 The second approach

The structure of the data is as before but we use 2 for a blank, 3 for an X and 5 for an O.
A variable called TURN indicates 1 for the first move and 9 for the last. The algorithm consists of three actions:
MAKE2 which returns 5 if the centre square is blank; otherwise it returns any blank non-corner square, i.e. 2, 4, 6
or 8. POSSWIN (p) returns 0 if player p cannot win on the next move and otherwise returns the number of the
square that gives a winning move.
It checks each line using products 3*3*2 = 18 gives a win for X, 5*5*2=50 gives a win for O, and the winning
move is the holder of the blank. GO (n) makes a move to square n setting BOARD[n] to 3 or 5.
This algorithm is more involved and takes longer but it is more efficient in storage which compensates for its
longer time. It depends on the programmer’s skill.

1.3 The final approach

The structure of the data consists of BOARD which contains a nine element vector, a list of board positions that
could result from the next move and a number representing an estimation of how the board position leads to an
ultimate win for the player to move.
This algorithm looks ahead to make a decision on the next move by deciding which the most promising move or
the most suitable move at any stage would be and selects the same.
Consider all possible moves and replies that the program can make. Continue this process for as long as time
permits until a winner emerges, and then choose the move that leads to the computer program winning, if possible
in the shortest time.
Actually this is most difficult to program by a good limit but it is as far that the technique can be extended to in
any game. This method makes relatively fewer loads on the programmer in terms of the game technique but the
overall game strategy must be known to the adviser.

LEVEL OF THE AI MODEL

‘What is our goal in trying to produce programs that do the intelligent things that people do?’

Are we trying to produce programs that do the tasks the same way that people do?
OR
Are we trying to produce programs that simply do the tasks the easiest way that is possible?

Programs in the first class attempt to solve problems that a computer can easily solve and do not usually use AI
techniques. AI techniques usually include a search, as no direct method is available, the use of knowledge about
the objects involved in the problem area and abstraction on which allows an element of pruning to occur, and to
enable a solution to be found in real time; otherwise, the data could explode in size. Examples of these trivial
problems in the first class, which are now of interest only to psychologists are EPAM (Elementary Perceiver and
Memorizer) which memorized garbage syllables.

The second class of problems attempts to solve problems that are non-trivial for a computer and use AI
techniques. We wish to model human performance on these:
1. To test psychological theories of human performance. Ex. PARRY [Colby, 1975] – a program to simulate the
conversational behavior of a paranoid person.
2. To enable computers to understand human reasoning – for example, programs that answer questions based
upon newspaper articles indicating human behavior.
3. To enable people to understand computer reasoning. Some people are reluctant to accept computer results
unless they understand the mechanisms involved in arriving at the results.
4. To exploit the knowledge gained by people who are best at gathering information. This persuaded the earlier
workers to simulate human behavior in the SB part of AISB simulated behavior. Examples of this type of
approach led to GPS (General Problem Solver).