Foundations of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems

The document contains the preface.

The document contains the acknowledgements. 

The document contains the list of figures

The document contains the contents.

From the ancient times, human beings tried to get their work done by human slaves or inanimate machines. Thanks to the industrial revolution, majority of the activities are today carried out by machines.

After beaten to pulp by the West during World War II, Japan bounced back and advanced into a state of Technological Marvel and rose like a phoenix bird. The Ministry .of Trade and Industry (MITI) funded a massive project in 1981. The project aimed at showing to the world how computers could be used to help humans in their reasoning capabilities.

Every AI program has to do the process of searching for the solution steps are not explicit in nature. This searching is needed for solution. steps are not known beforehand and have to be found out. Basically, to do a search process, the following are needed.

Making computers play games had been one of the major goals of researchers in computer science. Various researchers have extensively contributed for computer-game playing methods.

Shannon's paper on chess-playing program and Samuel's Checkers are considered as landmarks in the area of computer game-playing.

One of the prime activities of human intelligence is reasoning. The activity of reasoning involves construction, organization and manipulation of statements to arrive at new conclusions. Thus, logic can be defined as a scientific study of the process of reasoning and the system of rules and procedures that help in the reasoning process.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines knowledge as Intellectual acquaintance with, or perception of, fact or truth. A representation is a way of describing certain fragments or information so that any reasoning system can easily adopt it for inferencing purposes. Knowledge representation is a study of ways of how knowledge is actually picturized and how effectively it resembles the representation of knowledge in human brain.

Logic based systems are monotonic in nature. i.e., if a proposition is made which is true, it remains true under all circumstances. All theorems are proved by this methodology only. But in real life, all statements made do not necessarily mean that they are correct under all circumstances.

The term 'robot' is a Czech word, meaning slave. Issac Asimov, the renowned science fiction
writer coined the word robotics. Robotics is the study of designing, building and applying robots to various walks of life. This science has gained prominence today, because we have started using robots in practically in all spheres of our developments. This field has massive contributions from the fields of physics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, electronics engineering, metallurgy, industrial and production engineering. The implication of robotics in the life of humans, is also carefully monitored and studied by social scientists.

The Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Report has explicitly stated that for the Fifth Generation Computers, the input will be via voice, pictures and natural language dialogues. Present day sysi9ms expect people to learn and master a computer language and communicate with it. In other sense, the humans have to rise to the level of the machine. In order to bridge this gap between the humans and machines, computer scientists and linguists are vigourously working on Natural Language. Processing (NLP), a sub field of AI which deals with the methods of communicating with a computer in ones own natural language.

Every human being has five basic senses of perception viz., vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Of all of them, vision is very important and forms a basic knowledge acquisition system. The process of vision is a very complicated process be.cause it involves acquisition, transformation, analysis and interpretation of light images. Hence if a machine has to have the capability of vision, it mmt also perform all these activities mentioned above

The credibility of AI rose to new heights in the minds of individuals and critics when many Expert Systems (ES) were successfully planned, developed and implemented in· many challenging areas. As of today, quite a heavy investment is done in this area. The success of these programs in very selected areas involving high technk.al expertise has left people to explore new avenues.

In the previous chapter, we presented in a formal way, the underlying ooncepts of an expert system. A detailed description of one of the general purpose inference engine (GENIE) was also presented. In this chapter, we focus our attention oil the development of an expert system and all the associated factors.

In this chapter, we provide details on three successful expert systems in three different domains that not only led the path for the development of new techniques and tools but also proved that AI systems can be terribly successful in selected areas of expertise. The three systems discussed are:
1. DENDRAL does the inferring process of structure elucidation of chemical compounds.
2. MYCIN, an expert system for diagnosis of bacterial infections and effectively handles uncertain data.
3. XCON/Rl, a system in use at Digital Equipment Corporation for configuring VAX computers.

LISP (LISt Processing) is an AI' programming language developed by John Mccarthy in late 1950's. LISP is a symbolic processing langtiage that represents information in lists and manipulates these. lists to derive information. Till tOday, different dialects of LISP language have been developed. The foundations of these dialects remain the same while the syntax and functionality show a marked change. lp this chapter, we attempt to present the foundations of LISP and request the reader to refer to the programming manuals for the exact syntax.

This chapter deals with the preliminaries of PROLOG, an AI programming language. For majori! Y of activities in data processing specialized languages do exist. For example, COBOL for business applications, FORTRAN for scientific computations, BASIC for general purpose computing etc. In a similar way, LISP and PROLOG are the two major languages used for majority of the AI problems. We discussed LISP earlier. In this chapter, we discuss the preliminaries of PROLOG.

Computers of today are classified into one of the following four categories:
1. Single Instruction Single Data (SISD) machine
2. Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) machine
3. Multiple Instruction Single Data (MISD) machine
4. Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) machine

A leading and progressive private sector organisation headed by a renowned tyre technologist Dr. Ganapathy Ram, was beset with management problems. The ~mpany had four factories in different locations in India, and the Managing Director decided to invite a leading expert on management to study the managerial problems facing the company and suggest suitable remedial measures. The management expert, Prof. Gopalakrishnan, set about the task in a systematic, methodical. manner. He collected the relevant data from the company records, interviewed a large number of the company's staff, its vendors, industrial customers and even a few executives from a competitive organisation.

The document contains the index.