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Artificial Intelligence
General Conference
Skill Level 2
Year of Introduction: 2014

## 1. What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is man made intelligence using machines and software designed to perform given task and mimic the thinking process of a human being.

“The science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men” – Dr. Marvin Minsky (MIT)

## 2. On your own or with a group, develop a chart board that outlines a brief history of artificial intelligence. Prepare and give an oral presentation on your activity.

 Tip for earning from home during the pandemic The presentation can be prerecorded, be conducted by video conferencing, or be presented to your family.

The focus of this chart board is for the pathfinder to begin their research into the history of artificial intelligence and its path of acceptance as an academic discipline.

Should include more than modern AI

• 4th Century BC – Aristotle invents syllogistic logic and deductive reasoning
• 1206 – Al-Jazari designs what is beleved to be the first programmable humanoid robot
• 1642 – Pascal creates first mechanical calculating machine
• 1662 – Sir Samuel Morland devises Arithmetical machines
• 1673 – Leibniz improves Pascal’s machines to add division and multiplication and devises Calculus to determine how reasoning can be decided mechanically
• 1854 – George Boole develops binary algebra representing the laws of thought and creating Boolean expressions
• 1936 – Alan Turing proposes the universal Turing Machine
• 1943 – McCullock and Pitts publish “A logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” laying the foundations of neural networks
• 1956 – John McCarthy coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”
• 1957 Newel & Simon (Carnegie Mellon) demonstrate the General Problem Solver
• 1958 – John McCarthy invents LISP
• 1964 – Danny Bobrow defends his dissertation at MIT on Natural Language Processing
• 1968 - Minsky and Papert publish “Perceptrons” – demonstrating limits of simple neural nets
• 1969 - Shank (Yale) defined conceptual dependency model of natural language understanding
• 1972 – Comerauer develops PROLOG
• 1976 – Lenat’s dissertation with the Automated Mathematician program demonstrates computer learning and discovery of interesting conjectures
• 1980 – First AAAI (American Association of Artificial Intelligence) held at Stanford
• 1987 – Minsky publishes “The Society of Mind” a description of the mind as a collection of cooperating agents
• 1997 – Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov in a chess match
• 2011 - IBM's Watson competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings and won \$1 million using natural language processing.

## 3. What is the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence research?

The ultimate goal of artificial intelligence is to create a device that is capable of making independent external decisions using a series of self driven internal instructions. In other words, a part of its objective is to make a computer perform more like a human.

## 4. What is an android?

An android is an intelligent machine with a human appearance. Continued advancements in robotic technology have lighted the way for more improved designs that better impersonate human beings.

## 5. With regard to the field of artificial intelligence, be able to define the following terms.

### a. General Intelligence

a machine that is capable of displaying human-like general intelligence such as self awareness and consciousness.

### b. Social Intelligence

a machine that has the ability to express social skills and emotional skills based on the reactions of other people that it may come into contact with.


### c. Creativity

The processes of a machine gathering data that it knows and hypothesizing independent/spontaneous new information that is relevant to the problem

### d. Learning

a process of a computer evaluating input and extracting new knowledge or heuristics from the observation of existing data.

### e. Motion

a machine's ability to move and locate objects, including itself.

### f. Planning

the ability of a machine to set goals, and then move forward to achieve those goals.

### g. Perception

a machine's ability to use its own inputs like sensors, cameras, and microphones to develop its own conclusions.

### h. Heuristic

a machine's ability to search and locate the shortest path.

### i. Pattern Recognition

a machine's ability to make identification based on a series of inputs.

### j. Neural Network

used for machine learning, giving a machine the ability to ‘think’, based on selected inputs.

### k. Natural Language Processing

The ability for a machine to process spoken or written text and then devise and understand the context of the information being passed.  This is more than easy key word searches, but is actually centered on contextual information being garnered from text or speech.  Siri, Apple's iPhone assistant, is an accessable example.


### l. Knowledge Engineering

The process of interviewing experts in a given field and extracting the rule base/heuristics which allow them to process information and make conclusions. This rule base is then coded in the AI system to give the computer the captured expertise of the human.

## 6. Give three real world examples of how artificial intelligence is used to help society.

Artificial Intelligence is used in a variety of industries and fields.

In the manufacturing industry, the use of robots has increasingly become a standard practice. Selected functions are given to various robots, each working with the other as part of a larger goal. For example, AI can be used to maintain the cleanliness of a bottling factory. One robot is used to scan every bottle for its strength. Once a weak structured bottle is detected, it signals to another machine to knock that bottle off of the line. After a period of time, broken glass has accumulated in the designated broken glass area. Another robot waits for a preprogrammed amount of glass to accumulate, when it then comes out to clean all of the broken glass. This is all done without human intervention.

In the finance industry, billions of dollars flow through the financial institutions. Due to off shore accounts, money laundering, and the vast number of ways employed to defraud the banks, AI is used to flag transactions that will require human intervention. These transactions may have errors that were created by the sender that will trigger an alert.

Any company that is customer service driven will also find use to employ AI. AI can be used as a first level support alternative to answer some of the most basic of questions. This approach allows the more difficult questions and problems to be addressed by human service representatives.

In national security enormous amounts of information in natural language processed by computers each day to evaluate the context of the conversations and/or writing to assess potential threats posed to the country.

In medicine in February 2013, IBM announced that Jeopardy winning Watson's software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint. IBM says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.

## 7. What are some of the limitations to artificial intelligence? Be able to explain at least three.

The inability to learn from other people by either accepting or rejecting what they say as facts.

The inability to understand when to use proper means of communication at a given instant; weather it be seeing, reading, writing, or speaking.

As of this writing, the overall speed is slow. This is due to the vast amount of code involved to complete a simple task. For example, a programs designed to play a game can be very large due to the number of conditions that may exist in a given moment, i.e., where to move next in a checker game.

Machines are not sentient, they do not create spontaneous thought, cannot find humor or sadness in situations and cannot distinguish the importance of information on a personal level

Machines lack human self-awareness. Replicating self awareness means replicating the rather sophisticated types of “goal-oriented behavior” that define humans. Humans assign themselves goals, consider and choose steps to attain those goals and actively evaluate progress toward the goal. Humans who are self aware evaluate the factors hindering or facilitating progress toward the goal and then make adjustments. Often things don't turn out as humans expect they should based on available data, but humans then gather more data or just try something else.

Consider the invention of the light bulb. Edison and others tried many materials and scenarios some of which defied all known facts. Or consider the European explorers who sailed west to go east, defying the known fact the world was flat. It is human self awareness and goal-oriented behavior that usually makes great discoveries. Machines are usually limited to discovering new things by brute force, accessing known information and perhaps testing options over and over again until a solution is arrived at.

## 8. What are some basic human abilities that artificial intelligence can not exhibit?

Artificial Intelligence is its various forms is unlikely to ever exhibit human specific behaviors like:

• Dream, let alone understand or explain what it dreamed
• Acknowledge the presence of the almighty God
• Express emotion based on its surroundings
• Develop spontaneous thought devoid of conditional data
• Understand sarcasm, irony or humor
• Find the bridges for unrelated data without human intervention

## 9. Give a basic definition of an expert system?

An expert system is a branch of artificial intelligence. It is used to solve very complex problems by emulating the decision making process of a human being. It utilizes knowledge engineering to encapsulate the rules of operations from human experts, than captures those rules into heuristics and rapidly processes mass amounts of data through the rule set. Forward chaining takes the data through the rule sets marking what conclusions can be drawn, Backward chaining takes the data through the rule set and if conclusions are drawn looks at the marked rules that were not fired to determine if the new conclusions will draw any further conclusions. Hence it is non-linear processing of data in the same manner that human processes information sets.

## 10. What are some of the advantages of an expert system?

An expert system:

• renders an unemotional response at all times
• reduces danger for humans
• can be designed to have expertise in many areas
• can explain in detail how a conclusion was derived
• can draw conclusions many times faster than a human
• allows the programmed knowledge of a subject matter expert to be applied to problems without the expert needing to be involved each time a problem is presented.

## 11. Give a real world example of how an expert system is used in society.

Expert systems are used in the gaming industry; particularly for games that offer human vs. computer options. When playing against a computer, the expert system (the actual decision making engine of the game) is called to determine the next move given the current circumstance. In a game of chess, the professional moves of a grand master chess champion would be programmed, thus forming the expert system.

## 12. On your own or with a group, discuss the importance of artificial intelligence and the role it plays in society. Prepare and give an oral presentation on your findings.

Pathfinders are encouraged to seek a better understanding of artificial intelligence by discovering how it is being applied in real world scenarios and its impact in society. We suggest that after a brief discussion the Pathfinders go do individual research, keeping in mind that they are looking for places to visit that use AI (see next requirement). Each Pathfinder can then give an oral report of what they found, leading to a discussion.

## 13. Based on your observations from the previous question, visit a location that has applied the use of artificial intelligence. Prepare and give an oral presentation on your activity.

See previous guidance.

## 14. Discuss with a group several biblical passages that talk about human intelligence. Compare and contrast modern artificial intelligence with the intelligence God gave his created beings. Some texts include: Genesis 1:26, 27; Psalm 139; and Psalm 8:3-6.

Genesis 1:26, 27
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Psalm 139:
To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David.

1 O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. 2 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. 3 Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. 4 For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. 5 Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. 7 Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? 8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. 9 If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; 10 even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. 11 If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. 12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. 13 For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. 14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. 15 My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. 16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. 17 How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! 18 If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee. 19 Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men. 20 For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain. 21 Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? 22 I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies. 23 Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: 24 and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Psalm 8:3-6
3 When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,

the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; 4 what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? 5 For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. 6 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:

## References

1. http://www.aaai.org/home.html publishes quarterly newsletters, hosts conferences and is generally a good place to learn about the latest in this rapidly changing field.
2. This documentary covers much of this honor, focused on Watson. Read the requirement, watch it taking notes, then review the questions again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDBZnaoJVlk