Blind State Space Search : General Idea

We will be looking here for one solution only

Expand a state (find its successors / descendants / children / adjacent states)
Forward strategy
Backwards strategy
Bidirectional search

Exit:
A final state has been reached [Success]
All reachable states have been explored and no solution has been found [Failure]

After success – usually reconstruct the solution path

Medical diagnosis system

Performance measure: Healthy patient, minimize costs, lawsuits
Environment: Patient, hospital, staff
Actuators: Screen display (questions, tests, diagnoses, treatments, referrals)
Sensors: Keyboard (entry of symptoms, findings, patient's answers)

Intelligent Agents

An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through actuators

Human agent:
Sensors: eyes, ears, and other organs
Actuators: hands, legs, mouth, and other body parts
Robotic agent:
Sensors: cameras, infrared range sensors, etc.
Actuators: various motors

State of the art

IBM’s Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997
Proved a mathematical conjecture (Robbins conjecture) unsolved for decades
No hands across America project (driving autonomously 98% of the time from Pittsburgh to San Diego)
During the 1991 Gulf War, US forces deployed an AI logistics planning and scheduling program that involved up to 50,000 vehicles, cargo, and people
NASA's on-board autonomous planning program controlled the scheduling of operations for a spacecraft
Proverb solves crossword puzzles better than most humans

Thinking rationally: "laws of thought"

Aristotle: what are correct arguments - Yield correct conclusions when given correct premises
Several Greek schools developed various forms of logic: notation and rules of derivation
Direct line through mathematics and philosophy to modern AI: logicist tradition

1965 – programs that could, in principle, solve any solvable problem described in logic notation


Problems:
Not easy to take informal knowledge and state it in formal terms (particularly uncertain knowledge)
Solvable in principle <> practically solvable
Not all intelligent behavior is mediated by logical deliberation
What is the purpose of thinking? What thoughts should I have?

Thinking humanly: cognitive modeling

The General Problem Solver (Newell and Simon) – not important if the problem is solved correctly but rather if the steps correspond to the way humans think

Cognitive science brings together computer models from AI and experimental techniques from psychology to construct precise and testable theories of the working of the human mind
-- How to validate? Requires
1) Predicting and testing behavior of human subjects (top-down)
or 2) Direct identification from neurological data (bottom-up)
Both approaches (roughly, Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience) are now distinct from AI