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Artificial Intelligence MID SEM Some important Questions:

SHORT QUESTIONs

1. Rationality depends on the following things: Choose the incorrect answer.
i. The agent’s percept sequence to date.
ii. The agent’s prior knowledge of the environment.
iii. The actions that the agent can perform.
iv. Inference Engine

Correct Answer : (iv)

2. PEAS stands for _______
à Performance measure, Environment, Actuator, Sensor

3. What are four basic kinds of agent programs that embody the principles underlying
almost all intelligent systems ?

Answer:

I. Simple reflflex agents;
II. Model-based reflflex agents;
III. Goal-based agents; and
IV. Utility-based agents.


4. What are the different ways we can evaluate an algorithm’s performance?

Answer:

Completeness
Optimality
Time Complexity
Space Complexity
5. Identify the Local Search Method :

I. A* Search
II. Hill-Climbing
III. Greedy Best First Search
IV. Iterative Deepening Depth Limited Search (IDS)

Correct Answer : (ii) Hill-Climbing





6. What is Heuristic Search and Heuristic Function? Why choosing an appropriate
heuristic function important?
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à Heuristic search is otherwise called as Informed search. It uses problem-specific

knowledge
beyond the definition of the problem itself and can find solutions more efficiently than
an uninformed strategy.
A heuristic function takes a state as input and returns a numeric value (path cost from
a goal) as the output, which is the composite assessment of the state. It helps in
comparison between two non-goal state and so that the most promising state can be
chosen or it can judge how close the current state is to the goal state.
Choosing an appropriate heuristic function is important, because the next state we
choose depends on the score returned by heuristic function, and if we chose a wrong
next state, it may mis-lead us from the goal state.


7. Differentiate between Admissible heuristics and Inadmissible heuristics. Which one
breaks the optimality and why?
à A heuristic h(n) is admissible if for every node n, the below given condition is
satisfied-
h(n) ≤ h*(n), where h*(n) is the true cost to reach the goal state from n.
An admissible heuristic never overestimates the cost to reach the goal and hence it is
optimistic.
Whereas, an inadmissible heuristic does not satisfy the above condition and always
overestimates the cost and hence is pessimistic.
Inadmissible heuristics always breaks the optimality as they overestimates the cost
which is not at par to the real cost, hence misleads the path and may not return the
optimal solution.


8. “Consistency applies Admissibility”-Justify the statement. Under which condition A*
algorithm is optimal?
--> Consistent heuristics are very restricted heuristics, so they never overestimates the cost and
hence every consistent heuristic is an admissible heuristic. Hence, “consistency applies
admissibility” is justified. A* algorithm, if uses a tree search and follows an admissible heuristic,
then it is optimal.

9. What is a “Relaxed Problem”? Why is it needed in case of some problems? Explain with
an example.
--> A problem with fewer restrictions on the actions is called a relaxed problem. It is
needed in case of those problems, where a proper heuristic function cannot be
designed due to restricted actions. For example- In 8-puzzle problem, a H(n)= number
of misplaced tiles, can only be devised, because the restriction on the actions has been
relaxed and freedom has been granted to directly replace one tile at its proper location
according to the goal state.
10. What is Local search ? Explain disadvantages of local search. Suggest some solutions to
tackle with such problems.
à Local search techniques only search in its immediate neighborhood for the solution. So there is a
chance of getting trapped in local optimum. Some solutions to local optimum are-
– Move in some arbitrary direction
– Back track to an ancestor and try some other alternatives.

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11. The figure below shows the 8 puzzle problem with start state and goal state. Assuming that the
heuristic function h(n) sums the Manhattan distances of tiles out of place, the heuristic value of the
start state is________
4 8 6
1 7 3
2 5
Start state

1 2 3
4 5 6
8 7
Goal state
à 1+3+1+1+1+1+1+3 = 12

12. Mark the algorithm(s) for which space requirements grow linearly with depth.
(i) DFS (ii) BFS (iii) DFID (iv) All of these
ài. DFS & ii. DFID

13. Mark the algorithm(s) that always find(s) the shortest path from start state to goal state in
any search space.
(i) DFS (ii) BFS (iii) DFID (iv) None of these
--> ii. BFS & ii. DFID

14. Suppose, you are designing a machine to pass the Turing Test. What are the capabilities
such a machine must have?
à NLP, Knowledge representation, Automated reasoning, Machine learning, Computer
vision, Robotics

15. What is the branching factor in 24 puzzle problem?

è 8
16. What is the advantage of Depth First Search over Breadth First ?

(a) DFS is Complete whereas BFS is not complete in infinite search space.
(b) DFS provide optimal solution for Finite Search Space.
(c) Breadth First can be implemented in recursive way while DFS can not be implemented.
(d) DFS given a finite search space provides a better memory space requirements.

(d)

16. The main disadvantage of Depth Limited Search (DLS) over Breadth First (BFS) is ?
(a) For a solution sequence produced , time complexity of DLS is not comparable to BFS.
(b) For a solution sequence produced , space complexity of DLS is not comparable to BFS.
(c) The DLS is not complete.
(d) None of these.
(c)

17. Which search does not implements stack operation for searching the states?
(a) Depth-limited search
(b) Depth-first search
(c) Breadth-first search
(d) None of These.

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(c)

18. Which searching strategy explores the deepest state in the search tree?
(a) Greedy Best First.
(b) Depth First Search.
(c) Breadth First.
(d) A* Algorithm.

(d)

19. Given a problem in hand which strategy is preferred when a solution is required with best possible
space and time complexity.

(a) Depth First.
(b) Breadth First.
(c) Iterative Deepening Search.
(d) Depth Limited Search.

(c)

20. Define an Omniscient agent.

Answer: An omniscient agent knows the actual outcome of its action and can act
accordingly; but omniscience is impossible in reality.
20. What are the factors that a rational agent should depend on at any given time?
Answer:
• The performance measure that defines degree of success.
• Ever thing that the agent has perceived so far. We will call this complete perceptual
history thepercept sequence.
• When the agent knows about the environment.
• The action that the agent can perform.
21. List the various type of agent program.
Answer:
• Simple reflex agent program.
• Agent that keep track of the world.
• Goal based agent program.
• Utility based agent program
22. Give the structure of agent in an environment?
Answer:
Agent interacts with environment through sensors and actuators. An Agent is anything that
can be viewed as perceiving (i.e.) understanding its environment through sensors and acting
upon that environment through actuators.
23. How agent should act ?
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Answer:
Agent should act as a rational agent. Rational agent is one that does the right thing, (i.e.)
right actions will cause the agent to be most successful in the environment.
24. Define Ideal Rational Agent.

Answer:
For each possible percept sequence, a rational agent should select an action that is expected
tomaximize its performance measure, given the evidence provided by the percept sequence
and whatever built in knowledge the agent has.
25. What is important for task environment?
Answer:
PEAS → P- Performance measure
E – Environment
A - Actuators
S – Sensors
Example:
Performance: Interactive English tutor performance measure maximize student’s score on
test.
Environment: Set of students testing Agency
Actuators: Display exercises suggestions, corrections.
Sensors Keyboard entry
26. Define problem solving agent.
Answer:
Problem solving agent is one kind of goal based agent, where the agentShould select one
action from sequence of actions which lead to desirable states.
27. List the steps involved in simple problem solving technique.
Answer:
• Goal formulation
• Problem formulation
• Search
• Solution
• Execution phase

28. Define Agent.

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Answer: An Agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving (i.e.) understanding its
environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through actuators.

29. . What are the four approaches of defining Artificial Intelligence? State the six
capabilities required for a computer system to qualify for Total Turing Test.
Solution:
Part-1

1. Acting Humanly – The Turing Test approach

2. Thinking Humanly-The cognitive modelling approach
3. Thinking Rationally – The laws of thought approach
4. Acting Rationally – The rational agent approach

Part-2

1. Natural language processing (NLP)

2. Knowledge representation
3. Automated reasoning
4. Machine learning
5. Computer vision
6. Robotics

30. What is the basic difference between a rational agent and an omniscient agent? What
factors are responsible for converting a basic novice agent to an autonomous agent?
Solution:
Part-1
Rational agent is a real but not an ideal or perfect agent. It maximizes the expected
performance. But an omniscient agent knows the actual outcome of its actions. It maximizes
actual performance. So it is a perfect or ideal agent, but not a real agent. Omniscience is
impossible in reality.
Part-2
Autonomous agent = Basic (novice) agent + Information gathering + Exploration + Learning +
Experience
31. Differentiate between cooperative multi agent and competitive multi agent through a
suitable example.
Solution:
Cooperative multi agents mutually maximize their performance measures by cooperating
with each other. For example, two car driving agents taking mutual actions to avoid accident
due to collision with each other while both moving on the road opposite to each other.
Competitive multi agents compete with each other to maximize own performance measure at
the cost of others’ loss of performance measure. For example, one car driving agent competes
with another car driving agent to occupy the single parking slot available in a market place.
Another example of competitive multi agent is two chess playing agents. Two chess playing
agents compete with each other to maximize own score at the cost of failed move of other.
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32. Differentiate between a state and a node. Briefly state the four elements of a node as a
book keeping data structure through an example?
Solution:
Part-1
A node is a bookkeeping data structure used to represent the search tree. A state corresponds
to a configuration of the world. Thus, nodes are on particular paths, as defined by PARENT
pointers, whereas states are not. Furthermore, two different nodes can contain the same
world state if that state is
generated via two different search paths.

Part-2

For each node n of the tree, there are four components:
• n.STATE : the state in the state space to which the node corresponds;
• n.PARENT : the node in the search tree that generated this node;
• n.ACTION : the action that was applied to the parent to generate the node;
• n.PATH-COST: the cost, traditionally denoted by g(n), of the path from the initial state
to the node, as indicated by the parent pointers.

33. Justify why the time & space complexities of Bidirectional search (BDS) is considerably
less as compared to Breadth first search (BFS) for the given initial state and goal state.
Solution:

The time complexity of bidirectional search using breadth-first searches in both directions is
O(b ). The space complexity is also O(b ). This is because search stops in the midway as
d/2 d/2

soon as any one of the search paths from initial state (forward search) meets with any one of
the search paths from goal state (backward search).
For the similar condition, the time complexity of breadth first search from initial state to goal
state is O(b ). The space complexity is also O(b ). It is because searching proceeds only in one
d d

direction i.e. from initial state to goal state (only forward search).
The motivation is that bd/2 + bd/2 is much less than bd, or in the figure, the area of the two
small circles is less than the area of one big circle centered on the start and reaching to the

goal.

LONG QUESTIONs

1. 10 marks Question :=
a. What is Greedy Best First Search and A* Search? Explain various stages of Greedy Best
First Search and A* Search with an example.
b. Explain the following uninformed search strategies with examples:
i. Breadth First Search (BFS)
ii. Uniform Cost Search (UCS)
iii. Depth First Search (DFS)
iv. Depth Limited Search(DLS)
v. Iterative Deepening Search (IDS)

C. Explain the capabilities a system should possess to pass the Total Turing Test. Define Agent
Function, Agent Program and Agent Architecture with examples.
D. Explain in detail the properties of Task Environments. What is PEAS? Explain different
agent types with their PEAS descriptions.
E. What are the four basic types of agent programs in any intelligent system? Explain how did
you convert them into learning agents?
F. Write the Hill climbing search algorithm. Analyze the performance of the algorithm basing
upon appropriate characteristics feature.
G. Write the Steepest- Ascent Hill climbing search algorithm. Analyze the performance of the
algorithm basing upon appropriate characteristics feature. How is it different from Hill
climbing search algorithm?
H. Write the Greedy Best first search algorithm. Analyze the performance of the algorithm
basing upon appropriate characteristics feature. How is it a simplified version of A*
algorithm?
I. Write the A* algorithm. Analyze the performance of the algorithm basing upon appropriate
characteristics feature. Under which condition A* algorithm is optimal?
J. Given the initial state and final state of 8-puzzle problem, use A* algorithm to solve it.
Describe its problem definition and heuristic function properly.
Initial State:
1 2 3
4 6
7 5 8
Final State:
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8
K.

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L. Using A* Algorithm solve the problem. Where S is the initial node and G is the Goal
node. The actual cost is mentioned in black color. The heuristic value is mentioned in
the red color.

M. Write down the BFS algorithm and solve the following problem using it. Where the
starting node is A.

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N. What is the DFS? Write down the algorithm. solve the following problem using it.
Where the starting node is 2.

O. i. What is agent?
ii. What are their types?
iii. Describe the Simple reflex agents.

P. Consider the following figure

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A
A
D
B D B
C E C E

Start State Goal State

Use the heuristic function h(n)=+1, if the block is on the correct block/table
=-1, otherwise
Which type of problem do you face using hill climbing algorithm to reach the goal?
Use a suitable heuristic function to avoid this problem to reach the goal. Show all the steps.

Q. Consider the following 8 puzzle problem. Using A* algorithm, reach the goal state.

2 8 3
1 6 4
7 5
Start state

1 2 3
8 4
7 6 5
Goal state

R. Suppose, there are 3 jugs of capacities 8, 5 and 3 litres respectively. There is no scale on the
jugs, so it’s only their capacities that is known. Initially the 8 litre jug is full of water the other two
jugs are empty. The water can be poured from one jug to another. The goal is to have exactly 4 litre
of water in any of the jugs. The amount of the water in other two jugs at the end is irrelevant.
Formulate this problem as a state space search problem and draw the state space graph of this
problem.

S. Consider the search problem below with start state S and goal state G. The transition
costs are next to the edges, and the heuristic values are above the states.
(i) What is the path if best first search algorithm is used to reach the goal?
(ii) What is the path if depth first search is used? If a node has multiple successors, then
expend the successors in increasing alphabetical order
(iii) If A* algorithm is used, what is the path?
(iv) Is the heuristic function in this problem admissible?

h=8
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20

h=6 h=4 h=1

F G

h=6 h=0

1 3

h=5 h=2

















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T. i. What is AI?
ii. What are the applications of AI?
iii. What are various kind of problems in Hill climbing algorithm.
iv. What is the basic difference between Best First search and A* search
algorithms?
v. What is the heuristic function?
U. An N-Queen problem is given by “Given an N X N chess board with N Queens, place the
queens in such a manner that no Queens Attack each other”. Starting with an initial
configuration of placements of Queens where each Queen attacks every other Queen.
(1) Provide the State Space representation for the problem.(Precondition for atleast 4
actions are required).
(2) Explain how you will proceed with problem using Iterative Deepening Search Strategy.
( Go Upto Depth 3).

V. Given that b is the branching factor , n is the maximum depth of the search space and d
is the depth of the minimum path goal state , derive the Space and Time Complexity of
Depth First, Depth Limited and Iterative Deepening Search Strategy.
W. Tabulate the agent function for a simple vacuum cleaner agent with the given
environment of two floors A and B only. This agent is having two sensors. One
sensor senses the current location of the agent (floor A or floor B). The other
sensor senses the status of the current location (Dirty or Clean). It is assumed
that the agent can perform any one of the following three actions in a single time
unit:
Action R: Agent moves from location A to location B in a single step i.e. single
time unit.
Action L: Agent moves from location B to location A in a single step i.e. single
time unit.
Action S: Agent sucks the dirt from current floor in a single step i.e. single time
unit.
Calculate the Performance Measure of this Vacuum Cleaner agent for each of the
following four initial conditions by assuming that the agent operates for 100
time units:
i) [A, Clean], [B, Clean]
ii) [A, Dirt], [B, Clean]
iii) [A, Clean], [B, Dirt]
iv) [A, Dirt], [B, Dirt]

Following criteria is assumed for measuring the performance:

1. In each time unit, only one action (either R or L or S) takes place by the
agent.
2. +2 mark is rewarded to the agent for its every action (either R or L or S)
till two floors are clean.
3. -1 mark is given to the agent for its every move (either R or L) from one
location to other after both the floors are clean.

X. What is Task environment? How is it specified? What is PEAS specification?

Write the PEAS specifications for the task environments of the following agents
in a tabular manner:
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i) Medical Diagnosis system

ii) Part-picking Robot system
iii) Automated Taxi driving agent

Explain briefly six properties of environments of agents.

In a tabular manner, characterize in terms of these properties the
environments for the following agents:
i) Chess playing agent (with a clock)
ii) Automated Taxi driving agent
iii) Satellite Image Analysis system

Y. Briefly explain why a Table-driven agent is a failure.

What are four basic kinds of agent programs/structures that embody the
principle underlying almost all intelligent systems? Explain them briefly with
suitable examples. Draw the schematic diagram of each. Write agent programs
using the syntax of your textbook for any two of these four kinds.
Draw the schematic diagram of a Learning agent. Explain its four conceptual
components with suitable examples.
Z. Briefly state the five components of problem formulation for a problem-
solving agent. Formulate each of the following toy problems by stating these five
components:
i) 8-puzzle (sliding tile) problem, ii) 8-queen problem

What are the common four measures to measure the performance of any search
strategy? Give in a tabular manner, the comparison of performance measures of
following four search strategies:
i) Breadth first search
ii) Depth first search
iii) Depth limited search
iv) Iterative deepening search

For the following state space graph, by assuming that Sibiu is the initial state and
Bucharest is the goal state, explain the sequence of search steps under Uniform
Cost Search strategy.

[The numbers between the cities indicate the distances in kilometers and
hence these can be treated as step costs between the cities.]
AA. For a search tree, if b, the branching factor = 10, d, the depth of the
shallowest goal node = 6, calculate the time and memory requirements for the
number of nodes generated by assuming 1 million nodes generated per second
and 1000 bytes of memory required per node.
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What are the limitations of Depth-limited search (DLS)? How are these
limitations handled in Iterative deepening depth-first search (IDS). By
considering the worst case scenario and assuming b, the branching factor = 10
and d, depth of shallowest goal node = 5, calculate the extra number of nodes
generated through IDS as compared to that generated through Breadth first
search (BFS).
“Even if IDS requires more time and space, it is considered to be one of the
preferred uninformed search strategies when the search space is large and the
depth of the solution is not known”- Justify this statement.