Artificial Intelligence:

Its Roots and Scope

1.1 From Eden to ENIAC: Attitudes 1.3 Artificial Intelligence – A Summary
toward intelligence, Knowledge,
and Human Artifice
1.2 Overview of AI Application Areas

Dr. Muhammad Shaheen Khan

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 Humans
• Homo sapiens
– Man the wise
• Think
– What are thoughts?

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 Intelligence
• ??
• Aristotle: Nature is the
study of change
• What is logic Brain Logic
– Man is mortal.
Socrates is man, so….?
• Previous view about ?
nature
• Current view?
• What is intelligence 3
 History
• Should we credit Aristotle
• 1620: Francis Bacon: Entity=Sum of features,
How to search positive and negative features
• 1642: Blaise Pascal: Pascaline machine with an
argument “The arithmetical machines produce the
effect which approaches nearer to thought than all
the actions of animals”.
• 1694: Leibniz Wheel: A moveable carriage and a
hand crank to drive wheels and cylinders.
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 History
• 1680: Remarkable work of Descartes not directly
related to AI
– Reject input of senses
– Basis for reality: Introspection
• Brain and body are two entities
– What is the link? (mind-body problem)
– No specific response
• AI emerged as a result
• 1792: Charles Babbage: Machine for calculating
log table 5
 History
• Rationalist: Reconstruct the world by mathematics
• Empiricist: Nothing can enter the brain without
senses. (Memory is not imagination)
• Formal representation of logic
– 1854: Boole’s system
• 1950: Whitehead and Russel – Formal Foundation
of AI

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Fig 1.1 The Turing test.

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Luger: Artificial Intelligence, 5th edition. © Pearson Education Limited, 2005
Important Research and Application Areas

1.2.1 Game Playing

1.2.2 Automated Reasoning and Theorem Proving
1.2.3 Expert Systems
1.2.4 Natural Language Understanding and Semantic Modeling
1.2.5 Modeling Human Performance
1.2.6 Planning and Robotics
1.2.7 Languages and Environments for AI
1.2.8 Machine Learning
1.2.9 Alternative Representations: Neural Nets and Genetic Algorithms
1.2.10 AI and Philosophy

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Luger: Artificial Intelligence, 5th edition. © Pearson Education Limited, 2005
Important Features of Artificial Intelligence
1. The use of computers to do reasoning, pattern recognition, learning, or some other
form of inference.
2. A focus on problems that do not respond to algorithmic solutions. This underlies
the reliance on heuristic search as an AI problem-solving technique.
3. A concern with problem-solving using inexact, missing, or poorly defined
information and the use of representational formalisms that enable the
programmer to compensate for these problems.
4. Reasoning about the significant qualitative features of a situation.
5. An attempt to deal with issues of semantic meaning as well as syntactic form.
6. Answers that are neither exact nor optimal, but are in some sense “sufficient”.
This is a result of the essential reliance on heuristic problem-solving methods in
situations where optimal or exact results are either too expensive or not possible.
7. The use of large amounts of domain-specific knowledge in solving problems. This
is the basis of expert systems.
8. The use of meta-level knowledge to effect more sophisticated control of problem-
solving strategies. Although this is a very difficult problem, addressed in relatively
few current systems, it is emerging as an essential are of research. 9
 Sub Domains of AI
• Data based
• Process based
• Understanding
• Processing

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 State of the art in AI
• Robotics Vehicles
• Speech Recognition
• Autonomous Planning and Scheduling
• Logistic Planning
• Machine Translation

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 Assignment 1
• Give one case study of any of the
mentioned state of the art AI application.
• Write purely in your own words
• No less than one page (10 font, single
space, justify align)

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