Course Tile: Introduction to Artificial Course Code: CoSc 4142

Intelligence
Text Book: Russell, S. and P. Norvig (1995) Artificial Intelligence: A Modern
Approach Prentice-Hall.

Introduction and definition of Artificial intelligence (AI)

The following table shows some of the definitions of AI along two dimensions.
The definitions on top are concerned with thought processes and reasoning,
whereas the ones on the bottom address behavior.
The definitions on the left measure success in terms of fidelity to human
performance, whereas the ones on the right measure against an ideal performance
measure, called rationality. A system is rational if it does the ―right thing.

Definition of Artificial Intelligence: 4 categories

1. Thinking Humanly ―The exciting new effort to make computers think . . .

machines with minds, in the full and literal sense.
―[The automation of] activities that we associate with human thinking,
activities such as decision-making, problem solving, learning.

2. Thinking Rationally ―The study of mental faculties through the use of

computational models.―The study of the computations that make it possible
to perceive, reason, and act.

3. Acting Humanly ―The art of creating machines that perform functions that
require intelligence when performed by people.
―The study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment,
people are better.

4. Acting Rationally ―Computational Intelligence is the study of the design of

intelligent agents.
―AI is concerned with intelligent behavior in artifacts.
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Acting Humanly
The computer would need to possess the following capabilities:
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.
Total Turing includes a video signal so that the interrogator can test the subject’s
perceptual abilities, as well as the opportunity for the interrogator to pass physical
objects ―through the hatch.‖
The computer will need Computer vision to perceive objects.
The foundation of Artificial Intelligence
There are different disciplines that contributed ideas, viewpoints, and techniques
to AI.
1. Philosophy
Can formal rules be used to draw valid conclusions?
How does the mind arise from a physical brain?
Where does knowledge come from?
How does knowledge lead to action?
2. Mathematics
What are the formal rules to draw valid conclusions?
What can be computed?
How do we reason with uncertain information?
3. Economics
How should we make decisions so as to maximize payoff?
How should we do this when others may not go along?
How should we do this when the payoff may be far in the future?
4. Neuroscience
How do brains process information?
Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system, particularly the brain.
Although the exact way in which the brain enables thought is one of the
great mysteries of science, the fact that it does enable thought has been
appreciated for thousands of years because of the evidence that strong
blows to the head can lead to mental incapacitation.
5. Psychology
Cognitive psychology, which views the brain as an information-
processing device, can be traced back at least to the works of William
James.
6. Computer Engineering
How can we build an efficient computer?
For artificial intelligence to succeed, we need two things: intelligence and
an artifact. The computer has been the artifact of choice. The modern
digital electronic computer was invented independently and almost
simultaneously by scientists.
7. Control Theory
How can artifacts operate under their own control?
 8. Linguistic
How does language relate to thought?
Hybrid fields: computational linguistics or natural language processing.

History of artificial intelligence

1. The gestation of artificial intelligence (1943–1955)
2. The birth of artificial intelligence (1956)
3. Early enthusiasm, great expectations (1952–1969)
4. A dose of reality (1966–1973)
5. Knowledge-based systems:(1969–1979)
6. AI becomes an industry (1980–present)
7. AI adopts the scientific method (1987–present)
Application area of AI
1. The following are some of the application area of AI.
2. Robotic vehicles: A driverless robotic car
3. Speech recognition:
4. Autonomous planning and scheduling:
5. Game playing:
6. Spam fighting:
7. Logistics planning:
8. Robotics:
9. Machine Translation:(Language Translation)

Intelligent Agent

An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment

through sensors and acting upon that environment through actuators.

Example: - A robotic agent might have cameras and infrared range finders
for sensors and various motors for actuators.

A software agent receives keystrokes, file contents, and network packets as

sensory inputs and acts on the environment by displaying on the screen,
writing files, and sending network packets.

Percept: - refer to the agent’s perceptual inputs at any given instant.

Percept sequence: - is the complete history of everything the agent has ever
perceived.
Agent function: - maps any given percept sequence to an action.
A rational agent is one that does the right thing. What does it mean to do the right
thing? When an agent is plunked down in an environment, it generates a sequence
of actions according to the percepts it receives. This sequence of actions causes the
environment to go through a sequence of states. If the sequence is desirable, then
the agent has performed well.

This notion of desirability is captured by a performance measure that evaluates any

given sequence of environment states. As a general rule, it is better to design
performance measures according to what one actually wants in the environment,
rather than according to how one thinks the agent should behave.

Rationality

What is rational at any given time depends on four things:

This leads to a definition of a rational agent: For each possible percept sequence, a
rational agent should select an action that is expected to maximize its performance
measure, given the evidence provided by the percept sequence and whatever built
in knowledge the agent has.

3 concepts of Rationality:
1. Omniscience
2. Learning
3. Autonomy

An omniscient agent knows the actual outcome of its actions and can act
accordingly; but omniscience is impossible in reality. Rationality maximizes
expected performance, while perfection maximizes actual performance. Doing
actions in order to modify future percepts—sometimes called information
gathering—is an important part of rationality. Information gathering is provided by
the exploration that must be undertaken by an agent in an initially unknown
environment.
A rational agent not only needs to gather information but also to learn as much as
possible from what it perceives. The agent’s initial configuration could reflect
some prior knowledge of the environment, but as the agent gains experience this
may be modified and augmented.
If an agent relies on the prior knowledge of its designers rather than its own
percept it lacks autonomy. But an agent should be autonomous. When designing
an artificially intelligent agent it would be reasonable to provide it with some
initial knowledge as well as ability to learn.

There are different types of environment:

1. Fully observable: If an agent’s sensors give it access to the complete

state of the environment at each point in time, then we say that the
environment is fully observable.

2. Partially observable: An environment might be partially observable

because of noisy and inaccurate sensors or because parts of the state are
simply missing from the sensor data.

3. Single agent: If the task carried out by the single agent.

Solving Puzzle – single agent environment

4. Multi Agent: If the task carried out by more than one agent.
Playing chess – two agent environment

5. Deterministic: If the next state of the environment is completely

determined by the current state and the action executed by the agent, then
we say the environment is deterministic;

6. Stochastic: If the next state of the environment is cannot determine by

the current state and the action executed by the agent, then we say the
environment is deterministic;

7. Episodic: In an episodic task environment, the agent’s experience is

divided into atomic episodes. In each episode the agent receives a percept
and then performs a single action. Crucially, the next episode does not
depend on the actions taken in previous episodes.

8. Sequential: If the next episode depends on the actions taken in previous

episodes.

9. Static: If there is no change in the environment : Static Environment

 10.Dynamic: If environment is changed as per the percept sequence, it is
called as Dynamic environment.

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The Structure of Agents

An agent program that implements the agent function

The agent function is the one which maps percepts to actions which run on
some sort of computing device with physical sensors and actuators

Agent =architecture + program.

Four basic kinds of agent programs

- based reflex agents

- based agents and
- based agents
The simple reflex agent:
The simplest kind of agent is the simple reflex agent. These agents select actions
on the basis of the current percept, ignoring the rest of the percept history. Simple
reflex behaviors occur even in more complex environments.

Model-based reflex agents The most effective way to handle partial observability
is for the agent to keep track of the part of the world it can’t see now. It maintains
the percept history.

Goal-based agents:
The agent needs some sort of goal information that describes situations that are
desirable.

Utility-based agents:
Goals alone are not enough to generate high-quality behavior in most
environments.A more general performance measure should allow a comparison
ofdifferent world states according to exactly how happy they would make the
agent.An agent’s utility function is essentially internalization of the performance
measure.
Learning agents:

4 Conceptual components of Agent Structure

Critic: It gives the feedback to the Learning element regarding performance
standard. The critic tells the learning element how well the agent is doing with
respect to a fixed performance standard.
Learning element: It is responsible for making improvements in the agent.
Performance element: It is responsible for selecting external actions.
Problem generator: It is responsible for suggesting actions that will lead to new
and informative experiences. The point is that if the performance element had its
way, it would keep doing the actions that are best