Introduction and Overview

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

A field that focuses on developing techniques to enable computer systems to perform activities that are considered intelligent. The objective is to understand and build intelligent entities.

Associated questions

1) understand what constitutes intelligent behavior

2) build ``better'' computer systems

AI is one of the newest disciplines; it was initiated in 1956. It is a dynamic and open field.

The study on intelligence is one of the oldest disciplines; for over 2000 years philosophers have tried to understand and define intelligence.

What kinds of behaviors count as intelligent?

- Everyday activities such as: recognizing friends, having a conversation, planning and cooking a dinner, interpreting a photograph, walking to school.

-Formal tasks such as: proving theorems in logic, playing chess or checkers.

-Expert tasks such as: engineering a design, diagnosing an illness, doing financial analysis.

Which is harder and why?

It depends on the information that is accessible and how amenable it is to formalization.

Expert skills are often easier than everyday knowledge to formalize.

How to build a system?

Intelligent actions are typically complex, must be able to decide what to leave out and why.

System design problems where there is no single right answer. Part of the challenge of AI is defining appropriate tasks.

History has shown that until the problem is approached in the appropriate manner, limited progress is made.

Agent Design

An agent perceives an environment through sensors and acts on the environment through effectors.

Must be able to model an agent doing something for some purpose, i.e., taking actions toward some goal.

The objective is to design an agent that performs well, but what does that mean?

Design specifications are a particular challenge for AI because of the analogy with human behavior.

The approach taken by the text: systems that act rationally---acting so as to achieve one's goals

Human-like Rational
Think (A) think like humans (C) think rationally
Act (B) act like humans (D) act rationally



"Think" dimension: reasoning;

"Act" dimension: behavior

Columns contrast the human with the ideal

(A) equates to cognitive modeling

(B) equates to behaviorism

(C) equates to making correct inferences; there are problems with computational complexity

(D) the approach taken in this course

Acting rationally means acting so as to achieve one's goals, given one's beliefs; the assessment takes knowledge into account.

Correct inference is only sometimes a part of being a rational agent.

More amenable to standard evaluation than is comparison to human behavior.

Concentrate on the general principles of rational agents and the components of constructing them:



Goals of this course



OVERVIEW OF SYLLABUS