AI, an incomplete introduction

Session A01
2009 Dec Fall

Artificial Intelligence, termed AI, is an interesting topic over decades. This is truly interesting because it leads people creating machines that thinks same as a man.

Frankly its a branch of Computer Science and also depends hugely in Mathematics, Probability so on.

What is AI ?
Artificial Intelligence is concerned with the design of intelligence in an artificial device. The term was coined by McCarthy in 1956.

The definition seems to be little fuzzy and more tricky as well. Lets try to understand the basics.

One view is that artificial intelligence is about designing systems that are as intelligent as humans.
This view involves trying to understand human thought and an effort to build machines that emulate the human thought process. This view is the cognitive science approach to AI.

Moreover, One view is that artificial intelligence is about designing systems that are as intelligent as humans.
This view involves trying to understand human thought and an effort to build machines that emulate the human thought process. This view is the cognitive science approach to AI.
For more details on the Turing test visit the site http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~asaygin/tt/ttest.html

Logic and laws of thought deals with studies of ideal or rational thought process and inference. The emphasis in this case is on the inferencing mechanism, and its properties. That is how the system arrives at a conclusion, or the reasoning behind its selection of actions is very important in this point of view. The soundness and completeness of the inference mechanisms are important here.

The fourth view of AI is that it is the study of rational agents. This view deals with building machines that act rationally. The focus is on how the system acts and performs, and not so much on the reasoning process. A rational agent is one that acts rationally, that is, is in the best possible manner.

Now you may interested to get to know the things done using AI, therefore the below tasks are done mainly using AI powered mechanisms.

Medical diagnosis.
Mathematical problem solving
Playing games like chess
Bio-metric recognition
Automated Machines

On the other hand it has proved to be very hard to make computer systems perform many routine tasks that all humans and a lot of animals can do. Examples of such tasks include navigating our way without running into things, catching prey and avoiding predators. Humans and animals are also capable of interpreting complex sensory information.

Practically, AI components are embedded in numerous devices e.g. in copy machines for automatic correction of operation for copy quality improvement. AI systems are in everyday use for identifying credit card fraud, for advising doctors, for recognizing speech and in helping complex planning tasks. Then there are intelligent tutoring systems that provide students with personalized attention.

We will now look at a few famous AI system that has been developed over the years.

1. ALVINN:
Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network
In 1989, Dean Pomerleau at CMU created ALVINN. This is a system which learns to control vehicles by watching a person drive. It contains a neural network whose input is a 30x32 unit two dimensional camera image. The output layer is a representation of the direction the vehicle should travel.
The system drove a car from the East Coast of USA to the west coast, a total of about 2850 miles. Out of this about 50 miles were driven by a human, and the rest solely by the system.

2. Deep Blue
In 1997, the Deep Blue chess program created by IBM, beat the current world chess champion, Gary Kasparov.

3. Machine translation
A system capable of translations between people speaking different languages will be a remarkable achievement of enormous economic and cultural benefit. Machine translation is one of the important fields of endeavour in AI. While some translating systems have been developed, there is a lot of scope for improvement in translation quality.

4. Autonomous agents
In space exploration, robotic space probes autonomously monitor their surroundings, make decisions and act to achieve their goals.
NASA's Mars rovers successfully completed their primary three-month missions in April, 2004. The Spirit rover had been exploring a range of Martian hills that took two months to reach. It is finding curiously eroded rocks that may be new pieces to the puzzle of the region's past. Spirit's twin, Opportunity, had been examining exposed rock layers inside a crater.

5. Internet agents
The explosive growth of the internet has also led to growing interest in internet agents to
monitor users' tasks, seek needed information, and to learn which information is most useful.

Here I am winding up the first session on AI for Geeks, see you soon with the next article, google and grab more information.


You may visit http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/current.html, that ll help you lot.