CMSC 471

Introduction

Tim Finin, finin@umbc.edu

 What is AI?
• Q. What is artificial intelligence?
• A. 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
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/
are biologically observable.
 Ok, so what is
intelligence?
• Q. Yes, but what is intelligence?
• A. 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.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/whatisai/
 Big questions

• Can machines think? Can

they learn from their
experience?
• If so, how?
• If not, why not?
• What does this say about
human beings?
• What does this say about
the mind?
A little bit of
AI history
 Ada Lovelace
• Babbage thought his machine
was just a number cruncher
• Ada Lovelace saw that numbers
can represent other entities,
enabling machines to reason about
anything
• But, she wrote: “The Analytical
Engine has no pretentions
whatever to originate anything. It
can do whatever we know how to
 AI prehistory and early
years
• George Boole invented propositional logic
(1847)
• Karel Capek coined term robot in play
R.U.R. (1921)
• John von Neumann: minimax (1928)
• Norbert Wiener founded field of
cybernetics (1940s)
• Neural networks, 40s & 50s, among the
earliest theories of how we might
reproduce intelligence
• Isaac Asimov I, Robot (1950) Laws of
 AI prehistory and early
years
• Logic Theorist and GPS, 1950s, early
symbolic AI; focus on search, learning,
knowledge representation
• Marvin Minsky: neural nets (1951), AI
founder, blocks world, Society of Mind
• John McCarthy Lisp (1958), coined AI
(1957)
• Allen Newell, Herbert Simon: GPS (1957),
AI founders
• Noam Chomsky: analytical approach to
language (1950s)
• Dartmouth summer conference (1956)
 1956 Dartmouth AI
Project

Five of the attendees of the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on

AI reunited in 2006: Trenchard More, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky,
Oliver Selfridge, and Ray Solomonoff. Missing were: Arthur Samuel,
Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon.
 1956 Dartmouth AI
Project
“We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of
artificial intelligence be carried out during the
summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover,
New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the
basis of the conjecture that every aspect of
learning or any other feature of intelligence can
in principle be so precisely described that a
machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt
will be made to find how to make machines use
language, form abstractions and concepts, solve
kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and
improve themselves. We think that a significant
advance can be made in one or more of these
problems if a carefully selected group of
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html
scientists work on it together for a summer.”
 1956 Dartmouth AI
Project
“We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of
artificial intelligence be carried out during the
summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover,
New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the
basis of the conjecture that every aspect of
learning or any other feature of intelligence can
in principle be so precisely described that a
machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt
will be made to find how to make machines use
language, form abstractions and concepts, solve
kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and
improve themselves. We think that a significant
advance can be made in one or more of these
problems if a carefully selected group of
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html
scientists work on it together for a summer.”
 Recent AI History
• AI has had it’s ups and downs
– 50-60 up, 70s down, 80s up, 90s down,
00s up, 10s up, 20s up, …
– Like the stock market, the overall trend
is up
• Hot topics today?
– Neural networks again: deep learning
– Machine learning, datamining
– Exploiting big data
– Autonomous vehicles, robotics
– Text mining, natural language
technology, speech
– Computer vision
 Why AI?
Engineering: get machines to do useful
things
e.g., understand spoken natural language,
recognize individual people in visual scenes, find
the best travel plan for your vacation, etc.
Cognitive Science: model and
understand how natural minds and
mental phenomena work
e.g., visual perception, memory, learning,
language, decision making, etc.
Philosophy: explore basic, interesting
and important philosophical questions
Possible AI approaches
Like
humans Well

Think

Act
Possible approaches
Like
humans Well

GPS Rational
Think agents

Heuristic
Act Eliza
systems
Possible approaches
Like
humans Well

GPS Rational
Think agents
AI tends to
work mostly
in this area
Heuristic
Act Eliza
systems
 Turing Test
• Three rooms: person, computer,
interrogator
• Interrogator communicates with
others via a‘teleprinter’
• Interrogator tries to distinguish
person and machine
• Machine tries to fool the
interrogator into believing that it is
the person
• If machine succeeds, we conclude it
can think
 Eliza
• ELIZA: program simulating a
psychotherapist interacting with a
patient
– Joe Weizenbaum (MIT), ~1966, FORTRAN
• First script was DOCTOR
– Simple collection of syntactic patterns not
unlike regular expressions
– Patterns had associated replies that might
include bits of the input after simple
transforms (my  your)
• Weizenbaum shocked at reactions:
– Psychiatrists thought it had potential
– People unequivocally anthropomorphized
 It lives!
Amazingly, a 1966 version was
recently found and restored, see
http://elizagen.org/
 • I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your

Eliza problems. Each time you are finished talking,

type RET twice.
• i'm having a hard time with my students
• Why do you say that?
This is a tran-
• well, they keep asking me for money
script of a con-
• Maybe your plans have something to do with this.
versation with • what plans?
an Eliza-like • Is it because of your life that you say what plans?
program found • No, it's because I didn't know what you were
in Emacs talking about
• Is it because you didn't know what I was talking
Try typing about that you came to me?
• no, it's because i wanted to see if you could pass
Meta-x the turing test
doctor • Does it bother you that you wanted to see if I
could really pass the turing test?
in your • …..
favorite • How do you reconcile problems at school?
Emacs • This is a waste of time. Good bye
• My secretary will send you a bill.
 The Loebner contest
• Modern version of Turing Test, held
annually with a $100K cash prize
• Hugh Loebner was once director of
UMBC Academic Computing Services
(née UCS)
• Restricted topic (removed in ‘95) &
limited time
• Participants: humans, computers and
judges
• Scoring rank from least to most human
– Highest median rank wins $2000
– If better than a human, win $100K (Not
 Is it relevant to AI?
• Most AI researchers believe that
the Loebner contest is not
relevant to AI
• However, techniques used by
some are similar to those that are
driving many useful chat bot
applications
– These are supported, however, by
sophisticated speech to text and text to
speech systems
– And varying degrees of language
understanding and machine
 What’s easy and what’s
hard?
• Easy: many high-level tasks usually
associated with “intelligence” in people
• e.g., symbolic integration, proving theorems,
playing chess, medical diagnosis
• Hard: tasks many animals can do
• walking around without running into things
• catching prey and avoiding predators
• Interpreting sensory info. (e.g., visual, aural,
…)
• modeling internal states of other from
behavior
• working as a team (e.g., with pack animals)
• Is there a fundamental difference
 What can AI systems
do?
• Computer vision: face recognition from a large
set
• Robotics: autonomous (mostly) automobile
• Natural language processing: useful machine
translation and simple fact extraction
• Expert systems: medical diagnosis in narrow
domains
• Spoken language systems: e.g., Google Now,
Siri, Cortana
• Planning and scheduling: Hubble Telescope
experiments
• Learning: text categorization into ~1000 topics
• User modeling: Bayesian reasoning in Windows
help (the infamous paper clip…)
 What can’t AI systems do
yet?
• Understand natural language robustly
(e.g., read and understand articles in a
newspaper)
• Surf the web and find interesting
knowledge
• Interpret an arbitrary visual scene
• Learn a natural language
• Play Go well
• Construct plans in dynamic real-time
domains
• Refocus attention in complex
environments
• Perform life-long learning
 T.T.T
Put up in a place
where it's easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T. T. T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time.
-- Piet Hein
T.T.T: things take time
• Prior to the 1890’s,
papers were held
together with straight
pens.
• The development of
“spring steel” allowed
the invention of the
paper clip in 1899.
• It took about 25 years
(!) for the evolution of
the modern “gem
paperclip”, considered
to be optimal for
Climbing
Mount
Improbable

“The sheer height of the peak doesn't

matter, so long as you don't try to scale
it in a single bound. Locate the mildly
sloping path and, if you have unlimited
time, the ascent is only as formidable
as the next step”
-- Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount
Improbable, Penguin Books, 1996.