CS 416 Artificial Intelligence
Lecture 2 Introduction
CS at UVa
$11M in research grants each year
Top 5% of research is funded by NSF
Faculty trips to NSF set national funding priorities
Free MSFT Visual Studio for all students
75% faculty growth in past six years
Undergrad research awards from CRA Highest starting salary (in SEAS) for ugrads
Textbook
This is a great book
2nd edition released three years ago
Most widely used in U.S. universities
Its so good. Im going to make you read it!
Homework
Read chapters 1 and 2
Survey Results
Languages Supermajority prefers C++
Three people indicated theyll need C++ help
LISP? Math Many w/o stat 7 w/o diffyq 14 w/o linear algebra
5 people w/o GUI experience 4 people w/o MSFT Windows
14 people dont play so many video games
Where have you done the most programming? 216 17 Graphics 15 201/202 6 OS 2
AI apps Chess, google, spam filter, finance, chatterbot, games, vacuum 12% of CPU for AI tasks in games? More about magic tricks than AI?
iRoomba - Rodney Brooks (MIT) company
Languages
Is AI special in its PL needs? AI research used to be more symbolic A language had to make it easy to create symbols and to manipulate them Some symbols would operate on other symbols LISP supported programs as data and dynamic typing
Modern AI is more quantitative
No language has emerged with an advantage
Our language choice cannot distract from learning AI
Languages
C++ - Common industry language C gets a little closer to real-time OS
Perl the duct tape of the Internet makes the easy things easy and the hard things impossible theres more than one way to do it
Python theres only one way to do it Scheme easy to learn but difficult to extend Common Lisp the programmable programming language nontrivial to learn but a decidedly different experience from programming in imperative languages
What is expected of you
Youll have to do math
Neural network update function
wi j
x ,c T
P x ,c 2wi j
Multidimensional function minimization
Probability Bayes Rule We will teach necessary parts of statistics and linear algebra
P ( X | Y ) P (Y ) P (Y | X ) P( X )
Calculus expected. Probability and Linear Algebra beneficial.
What is expected of you
You have to program
The programming assignments are non-trivial
C++
Requires integration with existing code libraries Input/output handling (images, for example) We do not teach programming in this course
CS 216 expected. Additional programming experience beneficial.
AI Systems
Thermostat Tic-Tac-Toe
Your car
Chess Google Babblefish This thing Asimo
Examples
Chess: Deep Junior (IBM) tied Kasparov in 2003 match
ATRs DB Android Ritsumeikan University
RHex Hexapod
Hondas Asimo
AI Techniques
Rule-based Fuzzy Logic
Neural Networks
Genetic Algorithms Exhaustive search Expert Systems Logic
How to Categorize These Systems
Systems that think like humans Systems that act like humans Systems that think rationally
Systems that act rationally
Systems that think/act like humans
Its hard to study things you cant observe
How can I know how you think?
Observation is difficult (changing with fMRI). For the most part, you are a black box
Cognitive Science
How can I know how you act?
Observation is possible, but hard to control all aspects of experimental conditions.
Turing Test
Alan Turing Building a Brain
World War II motivated computer advances
Code breaking (1943, Colossus) Used to decipher telegrams encrypted using Germanys encryption machine
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC, 1946)
Turing greatly involved with British efforts to build computers and crack codes (Bletchley Park)
Arrested for being a homosexual in 1952 and denied security clearance Committed suicide in 1954
Systems that think/act rationally
Rely on logic itself rather than human to measure correctness
Thinking rationally (logically)
Socrates is a human; All humans are mortal; Socrates is mortal Logic formulas for synthesizing outcomes Acting rationally (logically) Even if method is illogical, the observed behavior must be rational
Perspective of this Course
We will investigate the general principles of rational agents
Not restricted to human actions and human environments
Not restricted to human thought Not confined to only using laws of logic Anything goes so long as it produces rational behavior
What is AI?
The use of computers to solve problems that previously could only be solved by applying human intelligence. thus something can fit this definition today, but, once we see how the program works and understand the problem, we will not think of it as AI anymore (David Parnas)
Foundations - Philosophy
Aristotle (384 B.C.E.) Author of logical syllogisms da Vinci (1452) designed, but didnt build, first mechanical calculator Descartes (1596) can human free will be captured by a machine? Is animal behavior more mechanistic?
Necessary connection between logic and action is discovered
Foundations - Mathematics
Leveraging uncertainty (Cardano 1501) Boolean logic (Boole, 1847)
Analysis of limits to what can be computed
Intractability (1965) time required to solve problem scales exponentially with the size of problem instance NP-complete (1971) Formal classification of problems as intractable
Foundations - Economics
Game Theory study of rational behavior in small games Operations Research study of rational behavior in complex systems Herbert Simon (1916 2001) AI researcher who received Nobel Prize in Economics for showing people accomplish satisficing solutions, those that are good enough
Foundations - Neuroscience
How do brains work?
Early studies (1824) relied on injured and abnormal people to understand what parts of brain do
More recent studies use accurate sensors to correlate brain activity to human thought
By monitoring individual neurons, monkeys can now control a computer mouse using thought alone
Melody Moore at GaState locked-in syndrome
(Gordon) Moores law states computers will have as many gates as humans have neurons in 2020 How close are we to having a mechanical brain?
Parallel computation, remapping, interconnections, binary vs. gradient
Foundations - Psychology
Helmholtz and Wundt (1821) started to make psychology a science by carefully controlling experiments
The brain processes information (1842)
Sense Think Act Cognitive science started at a MIT workshop in 1956 with the publication of three very influential papers
Foundations Control Theory
Machines can modify their behavior in response to the environment (sense / action loop) Water-flow regulator (250 B.C.E), steam engine governor, thermostat The theory of stable feedback systems (1894) Build systems that transition from initial state to goal state with minimum energy In 1950, control theory could only describe linear systems and AI largely rose as a response to this shortcoming
Foundations - Linguistics
Speech demonstrates so much of human intelligence
Analysis of human language reveals thought taking place in ways not understood in other settings
Children can create sentences they have never heard before Language and thought are believed to be tightly intertwined
