Introduction to AI

Introduction to AI

1. what is AI?

   • the ability of a computer or other machine to perform those activities that are normally thought to require intelligence.
   • The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
   • an area of computer science that deals with giving machines the ability to seem like they have human intelligence : the power of a machine to copy intelligent human behavior

2. What can AI do today?

   • The applications of AI is so widespread that it is difficult to give a concise response to such a question.
   • Game playing
     • Master level chess: there is some AI in them, but they play well against people mainly through brute force computation, looking at hundreds of thousands of positions.
   • Speech recognition
     • Typically found in various telephone booking systems for airlines and theatre tickets.
   • Understanding natural language
     • Just getting a sequence of words into a computer is not enough. Parsing sentences is not enough either. Semantics v syntax. The computer has to be provided with an understanding of the domain the text is about, and this is presently possible only for very limited domains.
   • Computer vision
     • Some useful programs can work solely in two dimensions, but full computer vision requires partial three-dimensional information that is not just a set of two-dimensional views. At present there are only limited ways of representing three-dimensional information directly, and they are not as good as what humans evidently use.
   • Expert systems
     • Many different applications such as oil prospecting, medical diagnosis, financial advice, etc
   • Intelligent tutoring systems
     • A form of computer-aided learning that offers the possibility of customising the interactions between a machine tutor and a student.

3. Turing test - an empirical approach designed to provide a definition of intelligence, based on the measure:

   • 1) Does a system act as if it is human?"
   • But to do the test, a machine would require at least the following capabilities:
   • * natural language processing - to communicate in natural language, such as English
   • * knowledge representation capabilities - to store what it knows
   • * automated reasoning - to use this stored knowledge to answer questions and draw conclusions