Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach Chapter 1 Introduction

Physical Symbol System

A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action. Any system exhibiting intelligence must operate by manipulating data structures composed of symbols.

Rational Agent

An agent that acts to achieve the best outcome or, when there is uncertainty, the best expected outcome

Artificial Intelligence

An attempt to understand and build intelligent entities.

Rationality

An ideal performance measure. A system is rational if it makes the right decision given what it knows.

Automated reasoning

The ability to use stored information to answer questions and to draw new conclusions

Game

The actions of one player can affect the utility of another positively or negatively.

Cognitive Psychology

The brain is an information-processing device.

Thinking Humanly

The exciting new effort to make computers think...machines with minds, in the full and literal sense.

Logic

The laws that govern the operation of the mind.

Acting Humanly

The study of how to make computers doe things which at the present moment humans are better.

Thinking rationally

The study of the computations that make it possible to perceive, reason and act.

Key steps to a knowledge based agent

1. The stimulus must be translated into an internal representation 2. The representation is manipulated by cognitive processes to derive new internal representations 3. These are in turn re-translated back in action

Total Turing test

A Turing test designed to test an AI's physical, vision and motion, capabilities.

Microworld

A limited problem that requires intelligence to solve.

Tractability

A problem is in tractable if the time required to solve instances of the problem grows exponentially with the size of the instance.

NP-Completeness

A problem that is NP-Complete has not fast method for finding a solution. That is, the time required to solve the problem using any currently known algorithm increases very quickly as the size of the problem grows.

Limited rationality

Acting appropriately when there is not enough time to do all the computations one might like.

Genetic Algorithm

Making an appropriate series of small mutations to a machine code program, one can generate a program with good performance for any particular problem.

Satisficing

Making decisions that are good enough rather than laboriously calculating an optimal decision.

Different Approaches to AI

Model humans or state from an ideal state: humanly vs. rationally.

Syllogisms

Patterns for argument structures that always yielded correct conclusions when given correct premises.

Turing Test

Proposed by Alan Turing, a computer passes the test if a human interrogator, after posing some written questions, cannot tell whether the written responses come from a person or from a computer.

Cognitive Science

Brings together computer models form AI and experimental techniques from psychology to construct precise and testable theories of the human mind.

Acting rationally

Computational intelligence is the study of the design of intelligent agents.

Probability

Dealing with uncertain measurements and incomplete theories.

Homeostatic Devices

Devices containing appropriate feedback loops to achieve stable adaptive behavior.

Weak Methods

General-purpose search mechanisms trying to string together elementary reasoning steps to find complete solutions. They did not scale up to large or difficult problem instances.

Intelligence

How a mere handful of matter can understand, predict, and manipulate a world much larger than itself.

Agent

Something that acts

Natural Language processing

The ability to communicate successfully in English

Knowledge representation

The ability to store what it knows or hears