Artificial Intelligence

Introduction

Prof. Mohamed K. Hussein

Faculty of Computers & Informatics, Suez Canal
University
[email protected]
 Textbook
 Not required, but for students who want to
read more we recommend
 Russell & Norvig, AI: A Modern Approach, 3rd Ed.

 Warning: Not a course textbook, so our

presentation does not necessarily follow the
presentation in the book.
 Today

 What is artificial intelligence?

 What can AI do?

 What is this course?

Sci-Fi AI?
 What is AI?
The science of making machines that:

Think like people Think rationally

Act like people Act rationally

 Think like humans

 Here, how the computer performs tasks does matter

 The reasoning steps are important

  Ability to create and manipulate symbolic knowledge

(definitions, concepts, theorems, …)

  cognitive science, neuroscience

 Act like humans
 The goal of AI is to create computer systems that
perform tasks regarded as requiring intelligence when
done by humans
  AI Methodology: Take a task at which people are
better, e.g.:
• Prove a theorem
• Play chess
• Plan a surgical operation
• Diagnose a disease
• Navigate in a building
and build a computer system that does it automatically
 Act rationally - Think rationally

 Now, the goal is to build agents that always make the

“best” decision given what is available (knowledge, time,
resources)

 “Best” means maximizing the expected value of a utility

function

  Connections to economics and control theory

 Rational Decisions
We’ll use the term rational in a very specific, technical way:
 Rational: maximally achieving pre-defined goals
 Rationality only concerns what decisions are made
(not the thought process behind them)
 Goals are expressed in terms of the utility of outcomes
 Being rational means maximizing your expected utility

A better title for this course would be:

Computational Rationality
Maximize Your
Expected Utility
Can Machines Act/Think Intelligently?

Turing Test:

 Test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950

 The computer is asked questions by a human
interrogator. It passes the test if the
interrogator cannot tell whether the
responses come from a person
 Required capabilities: natural language
processing, knowledge representation,
automated reasoning, learning,...
 No physical interaction
 A (Short) History of AI
 1940-1950: Early days
 1943: McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain
 1950: Turing's “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
 1950—70: Excitement: Look, Ma, no hands!
 1950s: Early AI programs, including Samuel's checkers program,
Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist, Gelernter's Geometry Engine
 1956: Dartmouth meeting: “Artificial Intelligence” adopted
 1965: Robinson's complete algorithm for logical reasoning
 1970—90: Knowledge-based approaches
 1969—79: Early development of knowledge-based systems
 1980—88: Expert systems industry booms
 1988—93: Expert systems industry busts: “AI Winter”
 1990—: Statistical approaches
 Resurgence of probability, focus on uncertainty
 General increase in technical depth
 Agents and learning systems… “AI Spring”?

 2000—: Where are we now?

 A (Short) History of AI
 1956: The name “Artificial Intelligence” is coined
 60’s: Search and games, formal logic and theorem proving
 70’s: Robotics, perception, knowledge representation,
expert systems
 80’s: More expert systems, AI becomes an industry
 90’s: Rational agents, probabilistic reasoning, machine
learning
 00’s: Systems integrating many AI methods, machine
learning, reasoning under uncertainty, robotics again
 What Can AI Do?
Quiz: Which of the following can be done at present?

 Play a decent game of table tennis?

 Drive safely along a curving mountain road?

 Buy a week's worth of groceries on the web?

 Discover and prove a new mathematical theorem?

 Perform a surgical operation?

 Put away the dishes and fold the laundry?
 Translate spoken Chinese into spoken English in real time?
 Natural Language
 Speech technologies (e.g. Siri)
 Automatic speech recognition (ASR)
 Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS)
 Dialog systems
 Natural Language
 Speech technologies (e.g. Siri)
 Automatic speech recognition (ASR)
 Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS)
 Dialog systems

 Language processing technologies

 Question answering
 Machine translation

 Web search
 Text classification, spam filtering, etc…
 Vision (Perception)
 Object and face recognition
 Scene segmentation
 Image classification

Images from Erik Sudderth (left), wikipedia (right)

 Robotics
 Robotics
 Part mech. eng.
 Part AI
 Reality much
harder than
simulations!

 Technologies
 Vehicles
 Rescue
 Soccer!
 Lots of automation…

 In this class:
 We ignore mechanical aspects
 Methods for planning
 Methods for control
Images from UC Berkeley, Boston Dynamics, RoboCup, Google
 Logic

 Logical systems
 Theorem provers
 NASA fault diagnosis
 Question answering

 Methods:
 Deduction systems
 Constraint satisfaction
 Satisfiability solvers (huge advances!)

Image from Bart Selman

 Game Playing
 Classic Moment: May, '97: Deep Blue vs. Kasparov
 First match won against world champion
 “Intelligent creative” play
 200 million board positions per second
 Humans understood 99.9 of Deep Blue's moves
 Can do about the same now with a PC cluster
 Open question:
 How does human cognition deal with the
search space explosion of chess?
 Or: how can humans compete with computers at all??
 1996: Kasparov Beats Deep Blue
“I could feel --- I could smell --- a new kind of intelligence across the table.”
 1997: Deep Blue Beats Kasparov
“Deep Blue hasn't proven anything.”
 Huge game-playing advances recently, e.g. in Go!

Text from Bart Selman, image from IBM’s Deep Blue pages
 Decision Making
 Applied AI involves many kinds of automation
 Scheduling, e.g. airline routing, military
 Route planning, e.g. Google maps
 Medical diagnosis
 Web search engines
 Spam classifiers
 Automated help desks
 Fraud detection
 Product recommendations
 … Lots more!
 Designing Rational Agents

 An agent is an entity that perceives and acts.

 A rational agent selects actions that maximize its
(expected) utility.
 Characteristics of the percepts, environment, and
action space dictate techniques for selecting
rational actions
 This course is about:
 General AI techniques for a variety of problem

Environment
types Sensors

Agent
Percepts
 Learning to recognize when and how a new
problem can be solved with an existing ?
technique
Actuators
Actions
 Pac-Man as an Agent

Agent Environment
Sensors
Percepts
?
Actuators Actions

Pac-Man is a registered trademark of Namco-Bandai Games, used here for educational purposes
 Course Topics
Agent Perception
 Part I: Making Decisions Robotics
 Fast search / planning
 Constraint satisfaction Reasoning
 Adversarial and uncertain search
Search
Learning
 Part II: Reasoning under Uncertainty
 Bayes’ nets Knowledge Constraint
 Decision theory
Planning rep. satisfaction
 Machine learning

 Throughout: Applications
 Natural language, vision, robotics, games, …
Natural
... Expert
language
Systems
2