Artificial Intelligence Introductory Lecture

Jennifer J. BurgDepartment of Mathematics and Computer Science

What is intelligence?

•The ability to perceive one’s surroundings, learn about one’s environment, and react appropriately to it.•The ability to respond to novel situations.•The ability to reason.•The ability to use language. •An awareness of one’s existence and reasoning abilities.

The study of computations that make it possible to perceive, act, and reason.

The enterprise of constructing a machine that can reliably pass the Turing test.

What is artificial intelligence?

An attempt to make computers go through a mechanical sequence of steps that mimic (and in many instances improve upon) the action of the human brain.

Student answers to the question “What is artificial intelligence?”

A set of rules to perform simple or complex tasks.

Student answers to the question “What is artificial intelligence?”

Artificial intelligence is the ability of a machine to achieve intelligence.It is the science of simulating human intelligence through software.

Student answers to the question “What is artificial intelligence?”

Needed for intelligence:•A set of rules for logic and prioritizing•An understanding of language for I/O -- a symbolic representation of knowledge•A searchable memory•Input devices to approximate the natural senses

Student answers to the question “What is artificial intelligence?”

Can a computer ever be considered intelligent, since it can’t really do anything other than what it is programmed to do?

Can we consider a machine intelligent if it doesn’t have any understanding of what it is doing?

Some interesting questions

Lady Ada Lovelace, commenting on Babbage’s Analytical Engine:

“It has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”

Are computers really intelligent?

“Be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly, have initiative, have a sense of humor, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream, make someone fall in love with it, learn from experience, use words properly, be the subject of its own thought, have as much diversity of behavior as man, do something really new.” (Alan Turing, 1950)

What can’t a computer do?

“Not until a machine could write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain -- that is, not only write it but know that it had written it.”

Are computers really intelligent?

Which of these could be considered an application of AI?

•An expert system for diagnosing illnesses•A word processing program•A program that does a Fast Fourier transform•A sorting program•A program that reads paragraphs in English and then answers comprehension questions about them•A theorem-proving program•A program that plays chess

What’s different about the types of programs which are generally

considered examples of artificial intelligence?

The computer is given some knowledge of “the world” and some reasoning ability, and then •it is expected to derive additional conclusions on the basis of what it has been told, •it is asked to answer questions based on what it knows, or•it is expected to react in reasonable ways to the novel situations in which it finds itself

Let’s be clear about our goals in artificial intelligence

We might want to create a machine that can solve problems intelligently so that the machine can take over some human tasks. (This would be a performance-oriented system.)ORWe might want to create a machine that thinks the way humans think so that we can understand our own intelligence better. (This would be a simulation-oriented system.)

Basic Topics in AI Research(used by other areas within AI)

Knowledge representation

Search algorithms and heuristics

Formal logic and automated reasoning

Important Specialized Fields in AI

In the area of perception:

Computer visionVoice recognitionRobotics

Important Specialized Fields in AI

In the area of reasoning, problem-solving, and communicating:

Automatic Theorem-ProvingLogic ProgrammingConstraint Satisfaction ProblemsGame PlayingNatural Language ProcessingPlanningLearningExpert Systems

Related Areas of Research

PsychologyCognitive ScienceMathematics (Logic, Computability Theory)PhilosophyLinguisticsComputer Engineering