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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Course Code - BSSE 475
Marks Distribution 2

Quizzes/Assignments 10
Presentations 10
Mid Term 30
Final Term 50
Total 100

Text Book: (Artificial Intelligence by: Stuart Russel & Peter Norvig)
Artificial Intelligence 3

 This course elaborate on various concepts of Artificial

Intelligence. The field itself is an emerging area of computer
sciences and a lot of work is underway in order to mature the
concepts of this field.

 We have used the name of the field i.e. Artificial Intelligence

(commonly referred as AI) without any explanation of the name
itself. Let us now look into a simple but comprehensive way to
define the field.
Intelligence 4

 To define AI, let us first try to understand that what is

Intelligence?

If you were asked a simple question; how can we define

Intelligence, many of you would exactly know what it is but most
of you won’t exactly be able to define it. Is it something
tangible? We all know that it does exist but what actually it is?
Some of us will attribute intelligence to living beings and would be
of the view that all living species are intelligent. But how about
these plants and trees, they are living species but are they also
intelligent? So can we say that Intelligence is a trait of some
living species? Let us try to understand the phenomena of
intelligence by using a few examples.
Intelligence 5

 Are the things shown below, Intelligent?

Ex-1: Searching a path …6
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 friend's
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 Different mice might follow different
to this problem. The mouse was paths based to their intelligence
intelligent enough to find a solution to the In other words: The problem can be
problem at hand solved in many ways

Ability to solve problems demonstrates Intelligence

Ex-2: Next number in the 7
sequence

…
Consider the following sequence …
1,3,7,13,21,__

 Ifyou were asked to find the next number

in the sequence what would be your
answer??
Ex-2: Next number in the 8
sequence (cont)…
• Just to help you out in finding the answer let us solve it for you “adding
the next even number to the series”
• Key: Adding the next EVEN number …

1+2 = 3; 3+4 = 7; 7+6 = 13; 13+8 =21; 21+10 = 31

1,3,7,13,21,31
• Again answering the question requires a little bit intelligence
Ex-2: Next number in the 9
sequence (cont)…
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.

All this thinking, this memory manipulation capability, this numerical

processing ability and a lot of other things add to ones intelligence.

Ability to solve problems demonstrates Intelligence

Ex-3: Scheduling time table10
 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.
Ex-3: Scheduling time table11
(cont)
 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
e.g. if we were to consider that teacher B might teach more
than one course AND he might just prefer to teach in room C
and many other things like that. The problem gets more and
more complex. We are pretty much sure than none of us had
ever realized the complexity through which our teachers go
through while developing these schedules for our classes.
However, like we know such time tables can be developed. All
this information has to reside in the developer’s brain. His
intelligence helps him to create such a schedule.
Ability to think, plan and schedule demonstrates
Intelligence
Ex-4: Doctor Checking the 12
patient
 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.
Ex-4: Doctor Checking the 13
patient (cont)
 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. For simplicity let us consider that some doctor only
checks these measurements and tries to come up with a
diagnosis for the disease.
Ex-4: Doctor Checking the 14
patient (cont)
 He takes these measurements and based on his previous
knowledge he tries to diagnose the disease. His previous
knowledge is based on rules like: “If the patient has a high BP
and normal T and normal PR then he is not well”. “If only the BP is
normal then what ever the other measurements may be the
person should be healthy”, and many such other rules.
 The key thing to notice is that by using such rules the doctor
might classify a person to be healthy or ill and might as well
prescribe different medicines to him using the information
observed from the measurements according to his previous
knowledge.
 Diagnosing a disease has many other complex information and
observations involved, we have just mentioned a very toy case
here.
Ex-4: Doctor Checking the 15
patient (cont)
 However, the doctor is actually faced with solving a problem of
diagnosis having looked at some specific measurements.
 It is important to consider that a doctor who would have a
better memory to store all this precious knowledge, better ability
of retrieving the correct portion of the knowledge for the correct
patient will be better able to classify a patient.

Ability to manipulate memory & information efficiently

demonstrates Intelligence
Ex-6: Fuzzy Problems 16

 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!

Ex-6: Fuzzy Problems (cont)17
 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.
Ex-6: Fuzzy Problems (cont)18
 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. Our intelligence actually helps us do
this.

Ability to tackle ambiguous & fuzzy problems

demonstrates Intelligence
Ex-7: Recognizing 19
Fingerprints
 Can you recognize a person just by looking at his/her
fingerprint? Though we all know that every human has a distinct
pattern of his/her fingerprint but just by looking at a fingerprint
image a human generally can’t just tell that this print must be of
person XYZ.

 On the other hand having distinct fingerprint is really important

information as it serves as a unique ID for all the humans in this
world.
Ex-7: Recognizing 20
Fingerprints (cont)
 Let us just consider 5 different people and ask a sixth one to
have a look at different images of their fingerprints. We ask him
to somehow learn the patterns, which make the five prints
distinct in some manner.

 After having seen the images a several times, that sixth person
might get to find something that is making the prints distinct.
Things like one of them has fever lines in the print, the other one
has sharply curved lines, some might have larger distance
between the lines in the print and some might have smaller
displacement between the lines and many such features.
Ex-7: Recognizing 21
Fingerprints (cont)
 The point being that after some time, which may be in hours or
days or may be even months, that sixth person will be able to
look at a new fingerprint of one of those five persons and he
might with some degree of accuracy recognize that which one
amongst the five does it belong.

 Only with 5 people the problem was hard to solve. His

intelligence helped him to learn the features that distinguish one
finger print from the other.

Ability to learn & recognize demonstrates Intelligence

Ex-8: Watching Television22
 Let us give one last thought and then will get to why we have
discussed all this.
 A lot of us regularly watch television. Consider that you switch
off the volume of your TV set.
 If you are watching a person standing with a stick and pointing
towards a board, you will somehow perceive that the person
standing in front of you is not singing a song, or anchoring a
musical show or playing some sport. So just by observing the
sequence of images of the person you are able to perceive
meaningful information out of the video. Your intelligence
helped you to perceive and understand what was happening
on the TV.

Ability to understand & percieve demonstrates

Intelligence
So, Let’s Summarize… 23
 Ability to solve problems
 Ability to plan and schedule
 Ability to memorize and process information
 Ability to answer fuzzy questions
 Ability to learn
 Ability to recognize
 Ability to understand
 Ability to perceive
 And many more …

Food for thought: Can only humans beings and animals possess
these qualities?
Intelligent Machines 24
 The discussion so far has a lot of consequences when we see it with
a different perspective. Lets get to something really interesting now
and hence informally define the field of Artificial Intelligence at the
same time.
WHAT IF
 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 perceives?
 A machine does MANY MORE SUCH THINGS …
 A machine behaves as HUMANS do? HUMANOID!!!
Intelligent Machines 25

 We will have to call such a machine Intelligent. Is this

real or natural intelligence?

 NO!

 This is Artificial Intelligence.

ASSIGNMENT 1 26

 Write down brief history and few applications of

artificial intelligence.

 Submission Deadline: 17/9/2018