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Unit 1: Overview of Artificial Intelligence

In classical planning problems, the agent can assume that it is the only thing acting on the world Notes
and it can be certain what the consequences of its actions may be. However, if the agent is not the
only actor, it must periodically ascertain whether the world matches its predictions and it must
change its plan as this becomes necessary, requiring the agent to reason under uncertainty.

1.3.2 Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural Language Processing gives machines the ability to read and understand the languages
that humans speak. A sufficiently powerful natural language processing system would enable
natural language user interfaces and the acquisition of knowledge directly from human-written
sources, such as Internet texts.

Figure 1.3: A NLP System

A parse tree represents the syntactic structure of a sentence according to some formal grammar.
Some straightforward applications of natural language processing include information retrieval
(or text mining) and machine translation.
A common method of processing and extracting meaning from natural language is through
semantic indexing. Increases in processing speeds and the drop in the cost of data storage makes
indexing large volumes of abstractions of the users input much more efficient.

1.3.3 Computer Vision

Machine learning is the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through
experience and has been central to AI research since the field’s inception. Unsupervised learning
is the ability to find patterns in a stream of input. Supervised learning includes both classification
and numerical regression. Classification is used to determine what category something belongs
in, after seeing a number of examples of things from several categories. Regression is the
attempt to produce a function that describes the relationship between inputs and outputs and
predicts how the outputs should change as the inputs change. In reinforcement learning, the
agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones. These can be analyzed in terms
of decision theory, using concepts like utility. The mathematical analysis of machine learning
algorithms and their performance is a branch of theoretical computer science known as
computational learning theory.

1.3.4 Intelligent Robots

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a general term that implies the use of a computer to model and/or
replicate intelligent behavior. Research in AI focuses on the development and analysis of
algorithms that learn and/or perform intelligent behavior with minimal human intervention.

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