Artificial Intelligence

Written By: B. J. Copeland

Introduction
Artificial Intelligence (AI), the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to
perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied
to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic
of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past
experience. Since the development of the digital computer in the 1940s, it has been
demonstrated that computers can be programmed to carry out very complex tasks—as, for
example, discovering proofs for mathematical theorems or playing chess—with great
proficiency. Still, despite continuing advances in computer processing speed and memory
capacity, there are as yet no programs that can match human flexibility over wider domains
or in tasks requiring much everyday knowledge. On the other hand, some programs have
attained the performance levels of human experts and professionals in performing certain
specific tasks, so that artificial intelligence in this limited sense is found in applications
as diverse as medical diagnosis, computer search engines, and voice or handwriting
recognition.
What Is Intelligence?
All but the simplest human behaviour is ascribed to intelligence, while even the most
complicated insect behaviour is never taken as an indication of intelligence. What is the
difference? Consider the behaviour of the digger wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus. When the
female wasp returns to her burrow with food, she first deposits it on the threshold, checks
for intruders inside her burrow, and only then, if the coast is clear, carries her food inside.
The real nature of the wasp’s instinctual behaviour is revealed if the food is moved a few
inches away from the entrance to her burrow while she is inside: on emerging, she will
repeat the whole procedure as often as the food is displaced. Intelligence—conspicuously
absent in the case of Sphex—must include the ability to adapt to new circumstances.
Psychologists generally do not characterize human intelligence by just one trait but by the
combination of many diverse abilities. Research in AI has focused chiefly on the following
components of intelligence: learning, reasoning, problem solving, perception, and using
language.

Learning
There are a number of different forms of learning as applied to artificial intelligence. The
simplest is learning by trial and error. For example, a simple computer program for solving
mate-in-one chess problems might try moves at random until mate is found. The program
might then store the solution with the position so that the next time the computer
encountered the same position it would recall the solution. This simple memorizing of
individual items and procedures—known as rote learning—is relatively easy
to implement on a computer. More challenging is the problem of implementing what is
called generalization. Generalization involves applying past experience to analogous new
situations. For example, a program that learns the past tense of regular English verbs by
rote will not be able to produce the past tense of a word such as jump unless it previously
had been presented with jumped, whereas a program that is able to generalize can learn
the “add ed” rule and so form the past tense of jump based on experience with similar
verbs.

Reasoning
To reason is to draw inferences appropriate to the situation. Inferences are classified as
either deductive or inductive. An example of the former is, “Fred must be in either the
museum or the café. He is not in the café; therefore he is in the museum,” and of the latter,
“Previous accidents of this sort were caused by instrument failure; therefore this accident
was caused by instrument failure.” The most significant difference between these forms of
reasoning is that in the deductive case the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the
conclusion, whereas in the inductive case the truth of the premise lends support to the
conclusion without giving absolute assurance. Inductive reasoning is common in science,
where data are collected and tentative models are developed to describe and predict future
behaviour—until the appearance of anomalous data forces the model to be revised.
Deductive reasoning is common in mathematics and logic, where elaborate structures of
irrefutable theorems are built up from a small set of basic axioms and rules.
There has been considerable success in programming computers to draw inferences,
especially deductive inferences. However, true reasoning involves more than just drawing
inferences; it involves drawing inferences relevant to the solution of the particular task or
situation. This is one of the hardest problems confronting AI.

Problem Solving
Problem solving, particularly in artificial intelligence, may be characterized as a systematic
search through a range of possible actions in order to reach some predefined goal or
solution. Problem-solving methods divide into special purpose and general purpose. A
special-purpose method is tailor-made for a particular problem and often exploits very
specific features of the situation in which the problem is embedded. In contrast, a general-
purpose method is applicable to a wide variety of problems. One general-purpose
technique used in AI is means-end analysis—a step-by-step, or incremental, reduction of
the difference between the current state and the final goal. The program selects actions
from a list of means—in the case of a simple robot this might consist of PICKUP,
PUTDOWN, MOVEFORWARD, MOVEBACK, MOVELEFT, and MOVERIGHT—until the goal is
reached.
Many diverse problems have been solved by artificial intelligence programs. Some
examples are finding the winning move (or sequence of moves) in a board game, devising
mathematical proofs, and manipulating “virtual objects” in a computer-generated world.
Perception
In perception the environment is scanned by means of various sensory organs, real or
artificial, and the scene is decomposed into separate objects in various spatial
relationships. Analysis is complicated by the fact that an object may appear different
depending on the angle from which it is viewed, the direction and intensity of illumination
in the scene, and how much the object contrasts with the surrounding field.
At present, artificial perception is sufficiently well advanced to enable optical sensors to
identify individuals, autonomous vehicles to drive at moderate speeds on the open road,
and robots to roam through buildings collecting empty soda cans. One of the earliest
systems to integrate perception and action was FREDDY, a stationary robot with a moving
television eye and a pincer hand, constructed at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland,
during the period 1966–73 under the direction of Donald Michie. FREDDY was able to
recognize a variety of objects and could be instructed to assemble simple artifacts, such as
a toy car, from a random heap of components.
Language
A language is a system of signs having meaning by convention. In this sense, language need
not be confined to the spoken word. Traffic signs, for example, form a minilanguage, it
being a matter of convention that ⚠ means “hazard ahead” in some countries. It is
distinctive of languages that linguistic units possess meaning by convention, and linguistic
meaning is very different from what is called natural meaning, exemplified in statements
such as “Those clouds mean rain” and “The fall in pressure means the valve is
malfunctioning.”
An important characteristic of full-fledged human languages—in contrast to birdcalls and
traffic signs—is their productivity. A productive language can formulate an unlimited
variety of sentences.

It is relatively easy to write computer programs that seem able, in severely

restricted contexts, to respond fluently in a human language to questions and statements.
Although none of these programs actually understands language, they may, in principle,
reach the point where their command of a language is indistinguishable from that of a
normal human. What, then, is involved in genuine understanding, if even a computer that
uses language like a native human speaker is not acknowledged to understand? There is no
universally agreed upon answer to this difficult question. According to one theory, whether
or not one understands depends not only on one’s behaviour but also on one’s history: in
order to be said to understand, one must have learned the language and have been trained
to take one’s place in the linguistic community by means of interaction with other language
users.

Methods and Goals in AI

Symbolic vs. Connectionist Approaches

AI research follows two distinct, and to some extent competing, methods, the symbolic (or
“top-down”) approach, and the connectionist (or “bottom-up”) approach. The top-down
approach seeks to replicate intelligence by analyzing cognition independent of the
biological structure of the brain, in terms of the processing of symbols—whence
the symbolic label. The bottom-up approach, on the other hand, involves creating
artificial neural networks in imitation of the brain’s structure—whence
the connectionist label.

chess: Chess and artificial intelligence

Machines capable of playing chess have fascinated people since the latter half of
the 18th century, when the Turk, the first of the pseudo-automatons,…

To illustrate the difference between these approaches, consider the task of building a
system, equipped with an optical scanner, that recognizes the letters of the alphabet. A
bottom-up approach typically involves training an artificial neural network by presenting
letters to it one by one, gradually improving performance by “tuning” the network. (Tuning
adjusts the responsiveness of different neural pathways to different stimuli.) In contrast, a
top-down approach typically involves writing a computer program that compares each
letter with geometric descriptions. Simply put, neural activities are the basis of the bottom-
up approach, while symbolic descriptions are the basis of the top-down approach.

In The Fundamentals of Learning (1932), Edward Thorndike, a psychologist at Columbia

University, New York City, first suggested that human learning consists of some unknown
property of connections between neurons in the brain. In The Organization of
Behavior (1949), Donald Hebb, a psychologist at McGill University, Montreal, Canada,
suggested that learning specifically involves strengthening certain patterns of neural
activity by increasing the probability (weight) of induced neuron firing between the
associated connections. The notion of weighted connections is described in a later
section, Connectionism.

In 1957 two vigorous advocates of symbolic AI—Allen Newell, a researcher at the RAND
Corporation, Santa Monica, California, and Herbert Simon, a psychologist and computer
scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—summed up the top-
down approach in what they called the physical symbol system hypothesis.
This hypothesis states that processing structures of symbols is sufficient, in principle, to
produce artificial intelligence in a digital computer and that, moreover, human
intelligence is the result of the same type of symbolic manipulations.
During the 1950s and ’60s the top-down and bottom-up approaches were pursued
simultaneously, and both achieved noteworthy, if limited, results. During the 1970s,
however, bottom-up AI was neglected, and it was not until the 1980s that this approach
again became prominent. Nowadays both approaches are followed, and both are
acknowledged as facing difficulties. Symbolic techniques work in simplified realms but
typically break down when confronted with the real world; meanwhile, bottom-up
researchers have been unable to replicate the nervous systems of even the simplest living
things. Caenorhabditis elegans, a much-studied worm, has approximately 300 neurons
whose pattern of interconnections is perfectly known. Yet connectionist models have failed
to mimic even this worm. Evidently, the neurons of connectionist theory are gross
oversimplifications of the real thing.

Strong AI, applied AI, and cognitive simulation

Employing the methods outlined above, AI research attempts to reach one of three goals:
strong AI, applied AI, or cognitive simulation. Strong AI aims to build machines that think.
(The term strong AI was introduced for this category of research in 1980 by the
philosopher John Searle of the University of California at Berkeley.) The ultimate ambition
of strong AI is to produce a machine whose overall intellectual ability is indistinguishable
from that of a human being. As is described in the section Early Milestones In AI, this goal
generated great interest in the 1950s and ’60s, but such optimism has given way to an
appreciation of the extreme difficulties involved. To date, progress has been meagre. Some
critics doubt whether research will produce even a system with the overall intellectual
ability of an ant in the forseeable future. Indeed, some researchers working in AI’s other
two branches view strong AI as not worth pursuing.
Applied AI, also known as advanced information processing, aims to produce commercially
viable “smart” systems—for example, “expert” medical diagnosis systems and stock-
trading systems. Applied AI has enjoyed considerable success, as described in the
section Expert systems.
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In cognitive simulation, computers are used to test theories about how the
human mind works—for example, theories about how people recognize faces or recall
memories. Cognitive simulation is already a powerful tool in both neuroscience
and cognitive psychology.