Artificial

Intelligence
 AI

 You are a caveman (or woman)

 I travel back in time and bring you

a LapTop and show you some of

the things it is capable of doing.
 Question : Would you, as a

caveman, consider the computer

to be intelligent?
 Big questions

 Can machines think?

 If so, how?
 If not, why not?
 What does this say about humans?
 What does this say about the mind?
 Searching a path …

Different mice might follow different paths based to their intelligence

In other words: The problem can be solved in many ways
Ability to solve problems demonstrates Intelligence
4
 Next number in the
sequence …
 Consider the following sequence …
1,3,7,13,21,__
– What is the next number ?

• Key: Adding the next EVEN number …

1+2 = 3; 3+4 = 7; 7+6 = 13; 13+8 =21; 21+10 = 31
1,3,7,13,21,31

Ability to solve problems demonstrates

Intelligence 5
So, Let’s Summarize…
 Ability to solve problems
 Ability to plan and schedule
 Ability to memorize and process information
 Ability to answer fuzzy questions
 Ability to learn
 Ability to recognize
 Ability to understand
 Ability to perceive
 And many more …

Food for thought: Can only humans beings and animals possess these
qualities? 6
 What if?
 A machine searches through a mesh and finds a path?
 A machine solves problems like the next number in
the sequence?
 A machine develops plans?
 A machine diagnoses and prescribes?
 A machine answers ambiguous questions?
 A machine recognizes fingerprints?
 A machine understands?
 A machine perceives?
 A machine does MANY MORE SUCH THINGS …
 A machine behaves as HUMANS do? HUMANOID!!!
Some Advantages of Artificial
Intelligence

– more powerful and more useful computers

– new and improved interfaces
– solving new problems
– better handling of information
– relieves information overload
– conversion of information into knowledge
Some AI Systems that are
Better Than Humans

 Backgammon
– TD gammon was the first program to beat
the worlds best players (Gerald Tesauro)
 http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/massive/

tdl.html
 IBM’s Deep Blue versus Kasparov

 On May 11, 1997, Deep

Blue was the first computer
program to beat reigning
chess champion Kasparov
in a 6 game match (2 : 1
wins, with 3 draws)
 Massively parallel
computation (259th most Searched the game tree •

powerful supercomputer in from 6-12 ply usually, up to

1997) .40 ply in some situations
 Evaluation function criteria One ply corresponds to –
learned by analyzing .one turn of play
thousands of master games
 AI Long Term Goals

Produce intelligent behaviour in machines

 Why use computers at all?
– They can do things better than us

– Big calculations quickly and reliably

 We do intelligent things
– So get computers to do intelligent things
The Disadvantages
– increased costs
– difficulty with software development - slow
and expensive
– few experienced programmers
– few practical products have reached the
market as yet.
 What is Artificial Intelligence ?

 making computers that think?

 the automation of activities we associate
with human thinking, like decision making,
learning ... ?
 the art of creating machines that perform
functions that require intelligence when
performed by people ?
What’s easy and what’s hard for AI?
 It’s been easier to mechanize many of the high-level tasks
we usually associate with “intelligence” in people
– e.g., symbolic integration, proving theorems, playing
chess, medical diagnosis
 It’s been very hard to mechanize tasks that lots of animals
can do
– walking around without running into things
– catching prey and avoiding predators
– interpreting complex sensory information (e.g., visual,
aural, …)
– modeling the internal states of other animals from their
behavior
– working as a team (e.g., with pack animals)
 Is there a fundamental difference between the two
categories?
What can AI systems do?
Here are some example applications
 Computer vision: face recognition from a large set

 Robotics: autonomous (mostly) automobile

 Natural language processing: simple machine

translation
 Expert systems: medical diagnosis in a narrow
domain
 Spoken language systems: ~1000-word continuous
speech
 Planning and scheduling: Hubble Telescope
experiments
 Learning: text categorization into ~1000 topics

 User modeling: Bayesian reasoning in Windows help

(the infamous paper clip…)
 Games: Grand Master level in chess (world
champion), checkers, etc.
 Shakey (1966-1972) Robotics
Cog (90s)

Robocup Soccer
Kismet (late 90s, 2000s) )2000s( Boss (2007)
 Robotics
• Mars rovers
• Autonomous vehicles
– DARPA Grand Challenge
– Google self-driving cars
• Autonomous helicopters
• Robot soccer
– RoboCup
• Personal robotics
– Humanoid robots
– Robotic pets
– Personal assistants?
How is it Currently
Done?

Crusher and, more recently, PerceptTOR

DARPA grand challenge
 Stanley Robot
Stanford Racing Team www.stanfordracing.org

Next few slides courtesy of Prof.

Sebastian Thrun, Stanford University
 Stanley’s Technology
Path
Planning

Laser Terrain Mapping

Learning from Human Drivers Adaptive Vision

Sebastian

Stanley

.Images and movies taken from Sebastian Thrun’s multimedia website

SENSOR INTERFACE PERCEPTION PLANNING&CONTROL USER INTERFACE

RDDF database corridor

Top level control Touch screen UI

pause/disable command
Wireless E-Stop
Laser 1 interface
RDDF corridor (smoothed and original) driving mode
Laser 2 interface

Laser 3 interface road center

Road finder Path planner
Laser 4 interface laser map

map trajectory
Laser 5 interface Laser mapper VEHICLE
Camera interface Vision mapper
vision map INTERFACE
obstacle list Steering control
Radar interface Radar mapper
vehicle state (pose, velocity) Touareg interface
vehicle
state Throttle/brake control
GPS position UKF Pose estimation
Power server interface
vehicle state (pose, velocity)
GPS compass

IMU interface Surface assessment

velocity limit

Wheel velocity

Brake/steering
heart beats Linux processes start/stop emergency stop

health status
Process controller Health monitor
power on/off
data

GLOBAL Data logger File system

SERVICES
Communication requests Communication channels clocks

Inter-process communication (IPC) server Time server

Google self-driving cars
 Europa Hydrobot
 http://www.resa.net/nasa/images/gem/

HYDROBOT.JPG
 AI Applications
 Autonomous Planning & Scheduling:
– Telescope scheduling
 AI Applications
 Medicine:
– Image guided surgery
 Vision
• OCR, handwriting recognition
• Face detection/recognition: many
consumer cameras, Apple iPhoto
• Visual search: Google Goggles
• Vehicle safety systems: Mobileye
AI Applications
:Games
 AI Applications
 Games:
 AI Applications
 Robotic toys:
 AI Applications
 Transportation:
– Pedestrian detection:
 Natural Language
• Speech technologies
• Automatic speech recognition
• Google voice search
• Text-to-speech synthesis
• Dialog systems
• Machine translation
 Why AI?
 Engineering: To get machines to do a wider variety
of useful things
– e.g., understand spoken natural language,
recognize individual people in visual scenes, find
the best travel plan for your vacation, etc.
 Cognitive Science: As a way to understand how
natural minds and mental phenomena work
– e.g., visual perception, memory, learning,
language, etc.
 Philosophy: As a way to explore some basic and
interesting (and important) philosophical questions
– e.g., the mind body problem, what is
consciousness, etc.
 AI Connections
 Philosophy logic, methods of reasoning, mind vs. matter,
foundations of learning and knowledge

 Mathematics logic, probability, optimization

 Economics utility, decision theory
 Neuroscience biological basis of intelligence
 Cognitive science computational models of human intelligence
 Linguistics rules of language, language acquisition
 Machine learning design of systems that use experience to
improve performance

 Control theory design of dynamical systems that use a controller to

achieve desired behavior
 Computer engineering, mechanical engineering, robotics, …
 Why is AI hard?
Two usual ingredients (for standard AI)
 Representation

– need to represent our knowledge in computer

readable form
 Reasoning

– need to be able to manipulate knowledge and derive

new knowledge
– many possible ways to do this, but most give rubbish
– finding the successful way usually involves search
Both of these are hard.
 The Travelling Salesman
Problem (TSP)
 A salesperson has to visit a number of cities
 (S)He can start at any city and must finish at that same
city
 The salesperson must visit each city only once
 For example, with 5 cities a possible tour is:
A
C
D

B
E
 Combinatorial Explosion
A 50 City TSP has 1.52 * 1064 possible solutions
Age of the universe is 15 billion (1.5 * 1010) years
There are 30 million seconds in a year
Age of universe is about 45 * 1016 seconds
A 10GHz computer might do 109 tours per second
Running since start of universe, it would still only have
done 1026 tours
Not even close to evaluating all tours!
Need to be clever about how to solve such search
problems!
 AI Generic Techniques
 Automated Reasoning
– Resolution, proof planning, Davis-Putnam, CSPs
 Machine Learning
– Neural nets, ILP, decision tree learning
 Natural language processing
– N-grams, parsing, grammar learning
 Robotics
– Planning, edge detection, cell decomposition
 Evolutionary approaches
– Crossover, mutation, selection
History of AI
 A dose of reality
 1940s McCulloch & Pitts neurons; Hebb’s learning rule
1950 Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
 Shannon’s computer chess
 1954 Georgetown-IBM machine translation experiment
 1956 Dartmouth meeting: “Artificial Intelligence” adopted
 1957 Rosenblatt’s perceptrons
 1950s-1960s “Look, Ma, no hands!” period:
 Samuel’s checkers program, Newell & Simon’s
 Logic Theorist, Gelernter’s Geometry Engine
 1966-73 Setbacks in machine translation
 Neural network research almost disappears
 Intractability hits home
 The rest of the story
 1974-1980 The first “AI winter”
 1970s Knowledge-based approaches
 1980-88 Expert systems boom
 1988-93 Expert system bust; the second “AI winter”
 1986 Neural networks return to popularity
 1988 Pearl’s Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems
 1990 Backlash against symbolic systems; Brooks’ “nouvelle
AI”
 1995-present Increasing specialization of the field
 Agent-based systems
 Machine learning everywhere
 Tackling general intelligence again?
 Harder than originally thought
• 1966: Weizenbaum’s Eliza
• “ … mother …” → “Tell me more about your family”
• “I wanted to adopt a puppy, but it’s too young to be
separated from its mother.”
• 1950s: during the Cold War, automatic Russian-
English translation attempted
• 1954: Georgetown-IBM experiment
• Completely automatic translation of more than sixty Russian
sentences into English
• Only six grammar rules, 250 vocabulary words, restricted to
organic chemistry
• 1966: ALPAC (Automatic Language Processing Advisory
Committee) report: machine translation has failed to live up to
its promise
• “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” → “The vodka is
strong but the meat is rotten.”
 Some Famous Imitation
Games

 1960s ELIZA
– Rogerian psychotherapist
 1970s SHRDLU
– Blocks world reasoner
 1980s NICOLAI
– unrestricted discourse
 1990s Loebner prize
– win $100,000 if you pass the test
44
 The problem with ELIZA
 Eliza
used simple pattern
matching
– “Well, my friend made me come
here”
– “Your friend made you come here?”
 Eliza
written by Joseph
Weizenbaum

45
Course Overview
 AI fundamentals

– Terminology
– Methodologies
 Logic Representation
 Search

 Game playing

 Decision-making under uncertainty

 Machine learning
 What is AI?
 There are no crisp definitions
Q. What is artificial intelligence?
A. It is the science and engineering of
making intelligent machines, especially
intelligent computer programs.
Q. what is intelligence?
A. Intelligence is the computational part
of the ability to achieve goals in the
world. Varying kinds and degrees of
intelligence occur in people, many
animals and some machines.
 What is Intelligence?
 Intelligence:
– “the capacity to learn and solve problems”
(Websters dictionary)
– in particular,
 the ability to solve novel problems
 the ability to act rationally

 the ability to act like humans

 Artificial Intelligence
– build and understand intelligent entities or
agents
– 2 main approaches: “engineering” versus
“cognitive modeling”
 Can Computers Talk?
 This is known as “speech synthesis”
– translate text to phonetic form
 e.g., “fictitious” -> fik-tish-es
– use pronunciation rules to map phonemes to actual sound
 Difficulties
– sounds made by this “lookup” approach sound unnatural
– sounds are not independent
– a harder problem is emphasis, emotion, etc
 humans understand what they are saying
 Conclusion:
– NO, for complete sentences
– YES, for individual words
 Can Computers
Recognize Speech?
 Speech Recognition:
– mapping sounds from a microphone into a
list of words
– classic problem in AI, very difficult
 “Lets talk about how to wreck a nice beach”
 (I really said “________________________”)

 Recognizing single words from a small

vocabulary
 systems can do this with high accuracy (order of
99%)
 Can Computers “see”?
 Recognition v. Understanding (like Speech)
– Recognition and Understanding of Objects in a scene
 lookaround this room
 you can effortlessly recognize objects

 human brain can map 2d visual image to 3d “map”

 Why is visual recognition a hard problem?

 Conclusion:
– mostly NO: computers can only “see” certain types of objects under limited circumstances
– YES for certain constrained problems (e.g., face recognition)
 Alan M Turing, Hero
 Helped to found theoretical CS
– 1936, before digital computers existed
 Helped to found practical CS
– wartime work decoding Enigma machines
– ACE Report, 1946
 Helped to found practical AI
– first (simulated) chess program
 Helped to found theoretical AI …
55
What did Turing think?
 Turing (in 1950) believed that by 2000
– computers available with 128Mbytes storage
– programmed so well that interrogators have
only a 70% chance after 5 minutes of being
right
 “By 2000 the use of words and general
educated opinion will have altered so
much that one will be able to speak of
machines thinking without expecting to
be contradicted”
56
 Can Machines Think?
 Turing starts by defining machine &
think
– Will not use everyday meaning of the
words
 otherwise we could answer by Gallup poll
– Instead, use a different question
 closely related, but unambiguous
 “I believe the original question to be too
meaningless to deserve discussion”

57
 A sample game
 Turing suggests some Q & A’s:
 Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth
Bridge
 A: Count me out on this one, I never could write poetry
 Q: Add 34957 to 70764.
– (pause about 30 seconds)
 A: 105621
 Q: Do you play chess?
 A: Yes
 Q: I have K at my K1, and no other pieces. You have only
K at K6 and R at R1. It is your move. What do you play?
– (pause about 15s)
 A: R-R8 mate
58
 Turing Test
 Three rooms contain a person, a computer,
and an interrogator.
 The interrogator can communicate with the
other two by teleprinter.
 The interrogator tries to determine which is
the person and which is the machine.
 The machine tries to fool the interrogator
into believing that it is the person.
 If the machine succeeds, then we conclude
that the machine can think.
The Imitation Game
 Interrogator in one room
– computer in another
– person in a third room
 From typed responses
only (text-only), can
interrogator distinguish
between person and
computer?
 If the interrogator often
guesses wrong, say the
machine is intelligent.

60
“Chinese room”
argument [Searle
1980]
image from http://www.unc.edu/~prinz/pictures/c-room.gif

 Person who knows English but not Chinese sits in room

 Receives notes in Chinese
 Has systematic English rule book for how to write new
Chinese characters based on input Chinese characters,
returns his notes
– Person=CPU, rule book=AI program, really also need lots of paper
(storage)
– Has no understanding of what they mean
– But from the outside, the room gives perfectly reasonable
answers in Chinese!
 Searle’s argument: the room has no intelligence in it!
 Who does AI?
 Academic researchers (perhaps the most Ph.D.-generating
area of computer science in recent years)
– Some of the top AI schools: CMU, Stanford, Berkeley,
MIT, UIUC, UMd, U Alberta, UT Austin, ... (and, of course,
Swarthmore!)
 Government and private research labs
– NASA, NRL, NIST, IBM, AT&T, SRI, ISI, MERL, ...
 Lots of companies!
– Google, Microsoft, Honeywell, Teknowledge, SAIC,
MITRE, Fujitsu, Global InfoTek, BodyMedia, ...