Chapter 1 | Introduction

10 Salient Sentences

1. AI is concerned with automating both mundane and expert tasks. Paradoxically, it turns out that it is the mundane tasks that are generally much the hardest to automate.

2. One conclusion from artificial intelligence research is that solving even apparently simple problems usually requires lots of knowledge.

3. Solving problems in a particular domain generally requires knowledge of the objects in the domain and knowledge of how to reason in that domain - both these types of knowledge must be represented.

4. Knowledge must be represented efficiently, and in a meaningful way. Efficiency is important, as it would be impossible (or at least impractical) to represent explicitly every fact that you might ever need. There are just so many potentially useful facts, most of which you would never even think of. You have to be able to infer new facts from your existing knowledge, as and when needed, and capture general abstractions which represent general features of sets of objects in the world.

5. To represent knowledge in a meaningful way it is important that we can relate facts in a formal representation scheme to facts in the real world. The formal representation will be manipulated using a computer program, with new facts concluded, so it is vital that we can work out what these formally represented conclusions mean in terms of our initial problem. The semantics of a representation language provides a way of mapping between expressions in a formal language and the real world.

6. Some of the most successful techniques for certain AI tasks turn out to be based on well-understood mathematical methods, rather than theories of human reasoning... It is sometimes argued that the success of these more mathematical techniques indicates a failure of AI methodologies. However, another viewpoint could be that the successful use of well-understood mathematical methods, where appropriate, is an indication of the subject's increasing maturity.

7. Artificial intelligence research makes the assumption that human intelligene can be reduced to the (complex) manipulation of symbols, and that it does not matter what medium is used to manipulate these symbols - it does not have to be a biological brain!

8. AI is concerned with attempts to produce programs to do tasks which require human intelligence.

9. Reasons for doing AI include both the goal of understanding human intelligence better and the goal of developing useful, smarter computer programs.

10. AI has been successful in limited tasks, but it is unclear whether a really human-like intelligent robot is possible or desirable.