Chapter #1

The Intelligent Computer

Chapter Outline
• How to define AI?
• Why AI is important?
• Application of AI
AI
• ability of problem solving
• the ability to think, plan and schedule
• The ability to tackle ambiguous and fuzzy
problems
The ability of solving problem
• Consider the following
image where a mouse is
trying to search a maze
in order to find its way
from the bottom left to
the piece of cheese in
the top right corner of
the image.
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• This problem can be considered as a common real
life problem which we deal with many times in our
life, i.e. finding a path, may be to a university, to a
friends house, to a market, or in this case to the
piece of cheese. The mouse tries various paths as
shown by arrows and can reach the cheese by more
than one path. In other words the mouse can find
more than one solutions to this problem. The mouse
was intelligent enough to find a solution to the
problem at hand. Hence the ability of problem
solving demonstrates intelligence.
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• Let us consider another problem. Consider the
sequence of numbers below:
• 1, 3, 7, 13, 21, ___
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• If you were asked to find the next number in the
sequence what would be your answer? Just to help you
out in the answer let us solve it for you “adding the
next even number to the” i.e. if we add 2 to 1 we get 3,
then we add 4 to 3 we get 7, then we get 6 to 7 we get
13, then we add 8 to 13 we get 21 and finally if we’ll
add 10 to 21 we’ll get 31 as the answer. Again
answering the question requires a little bit intelligence.
The characteristic of intelligence comes in when we try
to solve something, we check various ways to solve it,
we check different combinations, and many other
things to solve different problems.
the ability to think, plan and schedule
demonstrate intelligence.
• All of you have experienced your college life. It was very easy for
us to look at the timetable and go to the respective classes to
attend them. Not even caring that how that time table was
actually developed. In simple cases developing such a timetable is
simple. But in cases where we have 100s of students studying in
different classes, where we have only a few rooms and limited
time to schedule all those classes. This gets tougher and tougher.
The person who makes the timetable has to look into all the time
schedule, availability of the teachers, availability of the rooms,
and many other things to fit all the items correctly within a fixed
span of time. He has to look into many expressions and thoughts
like “If room A is free AND teacher B is ready to take the class AND
the students of the class are not studying any other course at that
time” THEN “the class can be scheduled”. This is a fairly simple
one, things get complex as we add more and more parameters
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• Consider a doctor, he checks many patients daily, diagnoses
their disease, gives them medicine and prescribes them
behaviors that can help them to get cured. Let us think a
little and try to understand that what actually he does.
Though checking a patient and diagnosing the disease is
much more complex but we’ll try to keep our discussion
very simple and will intentionally miss out stuff from this
discussion.
• A person goes to doctor, tells him that he is not feeling well.
The doctor asks him a few questions to clarify the patient’s
situation. The doctor takes a few measurements to check
the physical status of the person. These measurements
might just include the temperature (T), Blood Pressure (BP),
Pulse Rate (PR) and things like that.
ability to tackle ambiguous and fuzzy
problems
• Things are not all that simple. People don’t think about problems in the
same manner. Let us give you an extremely simple problem. Just tell us
about your height. Are you short, medium or tall? An extremely easy
question! Well you might just think that you are tall but your friend who is
taller than you might say that NO! You are not. The point being that some
people might have such a distribution in their mind that people having
height around 4ft are short, around 5ft are medium and around 6ft are
tall. Others might have this distribution that people having height around
4.5ft are short, around 5.5ft are medium and around 6.5ft are tall. Even
having the same measurements different people can get to completely
different results as they approach the problem in different fashion. Things
can be even more complex when the same person, having observed same
measurements solves the same problem in two different ways and
reaches different solutions. But we all know that we answer such fuzzy
questions very efficiently in our daily lives.
Intelligent Machine
• A machine searches through a mesh and finds a path?

• A machine solves problems like the next number in the sequence?

• A machine develops plans?

• A machine diagnoses and prescribes?

• A machine answers ambiguous questions?

• A machine recognizes fingerprints?

• A machine understands?

• A machine does MANY MORE SUCH THINGS!

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• We will have to call such a machine Intelligent.
Is this real or natural intelligence? NO! This is
Artificial Intelligence.
Formal Definition of AI
Systems that think like humans

• “The exciting new effort to make computers

think … machines with minds, in the full and
literal sense” (Haugeland, 1985)
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Systems that act like humans

“The art of creating machines that perform

functions that require intelligence when
performed by people” (Kurzweil 1990)
• To make computers think like humans we first
need to devise ways to determine that how
humans think
• There are two ways to do this:
• Introspection
• Psychological Experiments
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• Introspection: that is trying to catch out own
thoughts as they go by.

• Psychological Experiments: that concern with

the study of science of mental life.
• Artificial Intelligence is an effort to create
systems that can learn, think, analyze and act in
the same manner as real humans.
• They call this strong and weal AI.
• Strong AI means that machines act intelligently
and they have real conscious minds.
• Weak AI says that machines can be made to act
as if they are intelligent. That is Weak AI treats
the brain as a black box and just emulates its
functionality. While strong AI actually tries to
recreate the functions of the inside of the brain.
• The concept can be explained by an example. Consider
you have a very intelligent machine that does a lot of
tasks with a lot of intelligence. On the other hand you
have very trivial specie e.g. a cat. If you throw both of
them into a pool of water, the cat will try to save her
life and would swim out of the pool. The “intelligent”
machine would die out in the water without any effort
to save itself. The cat had strong Intelligence, the
machine didn’t. If the machine has strong artificial
intelligence, it would have used its knowledge to
counter for this totally new situation in its
environment. But the machine only knew what we
taught it or in other words only knew what was
programmed into it. It never had the inherent
capability of intelligence which would have helped it to
deal with this new situation.
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• Most of the researchers are of the view that
strong AI can’t actually ever be created and
what ever we study and understand while
dealing with the field of AI is related to weak
AI
Task#1
• Solve the following problem?

Goat =1

Grass =3
Lion =2