CS8691 Artificial Intelligence

Definition of Artificial Intelligence

  • Artificial Intelligence is the ability of a computer to act like a human being.
  • Artificial intelligence systems consist of people, procedures, hardware, software, data, and knowledge needed to develop computer systems and machines that demonstrate the characteristics of intelligence

Programming Without AI

Programming With AI

A computer program without AI can answer the

specific questions it is meant to solve.

A computer program with AI can answer the

generic questions it is meant to solve.

Modification in the program leads to change in its structure.

AI programs can absorb new modifications by putting highly independent pieces of information together. Hence you can modify even a minute piece of information of program without affecting its structure.

Modification is not quick and easy. It may lead to affecting the program adversely.

Quick and Easy program modification.

Four Approaches of Artificial Intelligence:

  • Acting humanly: The Turing test approach.
  • Thinking humanly: The cognitive modelling approach.
  • Thinking rationally: The laws of thought approach.
  • Acting rationally: The rational agent approach.

Acting humanly: The Turing Test approach

  • The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing (1950), was designed to provide a satisfactory operational definition of intelligence.
  • A computer passes the test if a human interrogator, after posing some written questions, cannot tell whether the written responses come from a person or from a computer.
  • natural language processing to enable it to communicate successfully in English;
  • knowledge representation to store what it knows or hears;
  • automated reasoning to use the stored information to answer questions and to draw new conclusions machine learning to adapt to new circumstances and to detect and extrapolate patterns.

Thinking humanly: The cognitive modelling approach

  • Analyse how a given program thinks like a human, we must have some way of determining how humans think.
  • The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science brings together computer models from AI and experimental techniques from psychology to try to construct precise and testable theories of the workings of the human mind.
  • Although cognitive science is a fascinating field in itself, we are not going to be discussing it all that much in this book.
  • We will occasionally comment on similarities or differences between AI techniques and human cognition.
  • Real cognitive science, however, is necessarily based on experimental investigation of actual humans or animals, and we assume that the reader only has access to a computer for experimentation.
  • We will simply note that AI and cognitive science continue to fertilize each other, especially in the areas of vision, natural language, and learning.

Thinking rationally: The "laws of thought" approach

  • The Greek philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to attempt to codify "right thinking",that is, irrefutable reasoning processes.
  • His famous syllogisms provided patterns for argument structures that always gave correct conclusions given correct premises.
  • For example, "Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is mortal".
  • These laws of thought were supposed to govern the operation of the mind, and initiated the field of logic.

Acting rationally: The rational agent approach

  • Acting rationally means acting so as to achieve one's goals, given one's beliefs. An agent is just something that perceives and acts.
  • The right thing that which is expected to maximize goal achievement, given the available information
  • Does not necessary involve thinking.
  • For Example, blinking reflex - but should be in the service of rational action.