Outline
Course overview What is AI? A brief history The state of the art
What is AI?
Views of AI fall into four categories:
Thinking humanly Thinking rationally Acting humanly Acting rationally The textbook advocates "acting rationally"
Acting humanly: Turing Test
Turing (1950) "Computing machinery and intelligence": "Can machines think?" "Can machines behave intelligently?" Operational test for intelligent behavior: the Imitation Game
Predicted that by 2000, a machine might have a 30% chance of fooling a lay person for 5 minutes Anticipated all major arguments against AI in following 50 years Suggested major components of AI: knowledge, reasoning, language understanding, learning
Thinking humanly: cognitive modeling
1960s "cognitive revolution": informationprocessing psychology Requires scientific theories of internal activities of the brain -- How to validate? Requires
1) Predicting and testing behavior of human subjects (top-down) or 2) Direct identification from neurological data (bottom-up)
Both approaches (roughly, Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience)
Thinking rationally: "laws of thought"
Aristotle: what are correct arguments/thought processes?
Several Greek schools developed various forms of logic: notation and rules of derivation for thoughts; may or may not have proceeded to the idea of mechanization Direct line through mathematics and philosophy to modern AI
Problems:
1. 2. Not all intelligent behavior is mediated by logical deliberation What is the purpose of thinking? What thoughts should I have?
Acting rationally: rational agent
Rational behavior: doing the right thing The right thing: that which is expected to maximize goal achievement, given the available information Doesn't necessarily involve thinking e.g., blinking reflex but thinking should be in the service of rational action
Rational agents
An agent is an entity that perceives and acts This course is about designing rational agents Abstractly, an agent is a function from percept histories to actions: [f: P* A]
For any given class of environments and tasks, we seek the agent (or class of agents) with the best performance
AI prehistory
Philosophy
Mathematics Economics Neuroscience Psychology
Computer engineering Control theory
Linguistics
Logic, methods of reasoning, mind as physical system foundations of learning, language, rationality Formal representation and proof algorithms, computation, (un)decidability, (in)tractability, probability utility, decision theory physical substrate for mental activity phenomena of perception and motor control, experimental techniques building fast computers design systems that maximize an objective function over time knowledge representation, grammar
Abridged history of AI
1943 1950 1956 195269 1950s 1965 196673
196979 1980-1986-1987-1995--
McCulloch & Pitts: Boolean circuit model of brain Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" Dartmouth meeting: "Artificial Intelligence" adopted Look, Ma, no hands! Early AI programs, including Samuel's checkers program, Newell & Simon's Logic Theorist, Gelernter's Geometry Engine Robinson's complete algorithm for logical reasoning AI discovers computational complexity Neural network research almost disappears Early development of knowledge-based systems AI becomes an industry Neural networks return to popularity AI becomes a science The emergence of intelligent agents
State of the art
Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 Proved a mathematical conjecture (Robbins conjecture) unsolved for decades No hands across America (driving autonomously 98% of the time from Pittsburgh to San Diego) During the 1991 Gulf War, US forces deployed an AI logistics planning and scheduling program that involved up to 50,000 vehicles, cargo, and people NASA's on-board autonomous planning program controlled the scheduling of operations for a spacecraft Proverb solves crossword puzzles better than most humans
