COMP210: Articial Intelligence

Lecture 1. Introduction
Boris Konev

http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/konev/COPM210/

Boris Konev

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Course Outline
The course consists of: 30 lectures slots (may use some for tutorials); tutorial exercises; lab exercises; Not assessed Class test based on the practicals!! enough self study to understand the material; two class tests; a two hour exam. Course materials, syllabus, the course guide, lecture slides, tutorial and lab exercises etc can be obtained from http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/konev/COMP210
Boris Konev

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References
(outlined in the course guide) Good AI books include:S. Russell and P. Norvig. AI A Modern Approach. Second Edition Prentice Hall, 2003 M. Ginsberg. Essentials of Articial Intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann, 1993. E. Rich and K. Knight. Articial Intelligence, McGraw-Hill, 1991 (2nd edition) The following is a (cheap) recent text (not as good as the above) covers standard material. A. Cawsey. The Essence of Articial Intelligence. Prentice-Hall, 1998.
Boris Konev

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References (contd.)
The following is a Prolog book. I. Bratko. Prolog Programming for Articial Intelligence. Addison Wesley 1990.

Boris Konev

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Course Contents
Introduction to Articial Intelligence Prolog - an AI programming language Search Knowledge Representation Propositional Logic First-Order Logic Resolution Based Proof for Propositional and First-Order Logics Expert Systems AI Applications

Boris Konev

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Learning Outcomes
An awareness of the principles of knowledge representation. An understanding of search techniques and logic, particularly as related to knowledge representation. An understanding of the major knowledge representation paradigms: production rules, prepositional and rst order predicate calculus and structured objects. An understanding of how these representations can be manipulated to solve problems in a knowledge based systems context.

Boris Konev

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Learning Outcomes (contd.)

Some appreciation of the major knowledge based systems. Awareness of other applications of AI. Familiarity with the essentials of Prolog so as to enable exploration of the above in practice.

Boris Konev

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What I expect from you.

To attend lectures. To be punctual. To turn mobile phones off and not to chat in lectures. To do whatever reading and self study is required to understand the material. To attempt the tutorial and laboratory exercises. To carry out assessed work individually and hand it in on time. Handing in assessed work is very important.

Boris Konev

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Credits
This set of slides is based on the materials provided by people who used to teach this course in the University of Liverpool Clare Dixon Simon Parsons Michael Wooldridge

Boris Konev

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What is intelligence?
For thousands of years people tried to understand how we think Philosophy Mathematics What is correct mathematical reasoning? Neuroscience Psychology Economics

Boris Konev

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What is AI?
AI attempts to build intelligent entities AI is both science and engineering: the science of understanding intelligent entities of developing theories which attempt to explain and predict the nature of such entities; the engineering of intelligent entities.

Boris Konev

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Four Views of AI
Systems that think like humans Systems that act like humans Systems that think rationally Systems that act rationally

AI as acting humanly AI as thinking humanly AI as thinking rationally AI as acting rationally

as typied by the Turing test cognitive science. as typied by logical approaches. the intelligent agent approach.

Boris Konev

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Acting Humanly
Emphasis on how to tell that a machine is intelligent, not on how to make it intelligent when can we count a machine as being intelligent? Can machines think? Can machines behave intelligently? Most famous response due to Alan Turing, British mathematician and computing pioneer:
HUMAN HUMAN INTERROGATOR

?
AI SYSTEM

Boris Konev

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Turing test
No program has yet passed Turing test! (Annual Loebner competition & prize.) A program that succeeded would need to be capable of: natural language understanding & generation; knowledge representation; learning; automated reasoning. Note no visual or aural component to basic Turing test augmented test involves video & audio feed to entity. Problem: Turing test is not reproducible, constructive, or amenable to mathematical analysis
Boris Konev

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Thinking Humanly
Try to understand how the mind works how do we think? Two possible routes to nd answers: by introspection we gure it out ourselves! by experiment draw upon techniques of psychology to conduct controlled experiments. (Rat in a box!) The discipline of cognitive science: particularly inuential in vision, natural language processing, and learning.

Boris Konev

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Human vs Machine Thinking (I)

Expert systems AI success story in early 80s Human experts knowledge and experience is passed to a computer program Rule-based representation of knowledge Typical domains are: medicine (INTERNIST, MYCIN, . . . ) geology (PROSPECTOR) chemical analysis (DENDRAL) conguration of computers (R1) Thinking humanly works

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Human vs Machine Thinking (II)

Computer program playing chess Human way Tried by World champion M.Botvinnik (who also was a programmer) Poor performance Computer way Sophisticated search algorithms Vast databases Immense computing power Human world champion beaten
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Thinking Rationally
Trying to understand how we actually think is one route to AI but how about how we should think. Use logic to capture the laws of rational thought as symbols. Reasoning involves shifting symbols according to well-dened rules (like algebra). Result is idealised reasoning.

Boris Konev

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Logic and AI
Logicist approach theoretically attractive. Lots of problems: transduction how to map the environment to symbolic representation; representation how to represent real world phenomena (time, space, . . . ) symbolically; reasoning how to do symbolic manipulation tractably so it can be done by real computers!

Boris Konev

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Acting Rationally (I)

Acting rationally = acting to achieve ones goals, given ones beliefs. An agent is a system that perceives and acts; intelligent agent is one that acts rationally w.r.t. the goals we delegate to it. Emphasis shifts from designing theoretically best decision making procedure to best decision making procedure possible in circumstances. Logic may be used in the service of nding the best action not an end in itself.

Boris Konev

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Acting Rationally (II)

Achieving perfect rationality making the best decision theoretically possible is not usually possible, due to limited resources: limited time; limited computational power; limited memory; limited or uncertain information about environment. The trick is to do the best with what youve got!

Boris Konev

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