Artificial Intelligence
6.825 Techniques in Artificial Intelligence
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Lecture 1 • 1
If you're going to teach or take an AI course, it's useful to ask: "What's AI?"
It's a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Let's go through a few things that AI is thought to be and situate them within the broader picture of
AI.
1
6.825 Techniques in Artificial Intelligence
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
• Computational models of human behavior?
• Programs that behave (externally) like humans
Lecture 1 • 2
One thing it could be is "Making computational models of human behavior".
Since we believe that humans are intelligent, therefore models of intelligent behavior must be AI. There's a great paper by Turing who really set up this idea of AI as making models of human behavior (link). In this way of thinking of AI, how would you proceed as an AI scientist? One way, which would be a kind of cognitive science, is to do experiments on humans, see how they behave in certain situations and see if you could make computers behave in that same way. Imagine that you wanted to make a program that played poker. Instead of making the best possible poker-playing program, you would make one that played poker like people do.
2
6.825 Techniques in Artificial Intelligence
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
• Computational models of human behavior?
• Programs that behave (externally) like humans
• Computational models of human “thought” processes? • Programs that operate (internally) the way humans do
Lecture 1 • 3
Another way is to make computational models of human thought processes.
This is a stronger and more constrained view of what the enterprise is. It is not enough to make a program that seems to behave the way humans do; you want to make a program that does it the way humans do it. A lot of people have worked on this in cognitive science and in an area called cognitive neuroscience. The
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Lecture 1 • 1
If you're going to teach or take an AI course, it's useful to ask: "What's AI?"
It's a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Let's go through a few things that AI is thought to be and situate them within the broader picture of
AI.
1
6.825 Techniques in Artificial Intelligence
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
• Computational models of human behavior?
• Programs that behave (externally) like humans
Lecture 1 • 2
One thing it could be is "Making computational models of human behavior".
Since we believe that humans are intelligent, therefore models of intelligent behavior must be AI. There's a great paper by Turing who really set up this idea of AI as making models of human behavior (link). In this way of thinking of AI, how would you proceed as an AI scientist? One way, which would be a kind of cognitive science, is to do experiments on humans, see how they behave in certain situations and see if you could make computers behave in that same way. Imagine that you wanted to make a program that played poker. Instead of making the best possible poker-playing program, you would make one that played poker like people do.
2
6.825 Techniques in Artificial Intelligence
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
• Computational models of human behavior?
• Programs that behave (externally) like humans
• Computational models of human “thought” processes? • Programs that operate (internally) the way humans do
Lecture 1 • 3
Another way is to make computational models of human thought processes.
This is a stronger and more constrained view of what the enterprise is. It is not enough to make a program that seems to behave the way humans do; you want to make a program that does it the way humans do it. A lot of people have worked on this in cognitive science and in an area called cognitive neuroscience. The