BCA (New) Assignment for the Session July 2010 6th Semester

BC005901 – Artificial Intelligence

1. What are the achievements of AI?

Ans. The achievements of AI are as follows: -
 Deep thought is an international grand master chess player.
 Sphinx can recognize continuous speech without training for each speaker. It operates in near
real time using a vocabulary of 1000 words and has 94% word accuracy.
 Navlab is a truck that can drive along a road at 55 KMPH in normal traffic.
 Carlton and United Breweries use an AI planning system to plan production of their beer.
 Robots are used regularly in manufacturing.
 Natural language interface to databases can be obtained on a PC.
 Machine Learning methods have been used to build expert systems.
 Expert systems are used regularly in finance, medicine, manufacturing, and agriculture.

2. Comment on “Heuristics are fallible.”

Ans. Heuristics are fallible because they rely on limited information, they may lead to a suboptimal
solution or to a dead end.
Heuristics is a rule of thumb or judgmental technique that leads to a solution some of the time
but provides no guarantee of success. It may in fact end in failure. Heuristics plays an important role
in search strategies because of the exponential nature of most problems. They help to reduce the
number of alternatives from an exponential number to a polynomial number and, thereby, obtain a
solution to a tolerable amount of time. When exhaustive search is impractical, it is necessary to
compromise for a constrained search which eliminates many paths but offers the promise of success
some of the time. Here, success may be considered to be finding an optimal solution a fair proportion
of the time or just finding good solutions much of the time.
 3. What is the Drawback/Complexity of A*?
Ans. The catch with A* is that even though it is complete, optimally efficient, it still can’t always be
used, because for most problems, the number of nodes within the goal contour search space is still
exponential in the length of the solution.
Similarly to breadth first search, however the major difficulty with A* is the amount of space that
it uses.

4. What different kinds of knowledge need to be represented in AI?

Ans. Several kinds of information need to be represented in AI are as follows: -
 Long –Term Knowledge: - This is accumulated knowledge about the world. It can include
simple data, general rules (every person has a mother), programs, and heuristic knowledge
(Knowledge of what is likely to work). The collection of long term knowledge is often called a
knowledge base (KB). Human long-term memory seems unlimited, but writing to it is slow.
 Current Data: A representation of the facts of the current situation. Human short term
memory is very limited.
 Conjectures: Courses of action or reasoning that are being considered but are not yet final.

5. Explain the process of Skolemization. How is this accomplished? Give suitable examples in
support of your answer.

Ans. Skolemization is the process of removing existential quantifiers by elimination. In the simple
translate into P (A), where A is a constant that does not appear elsewhere in the KB. But there
is the added complication that some of the existential quantifiers, even though move left, may still be
nested inside a universal quantifier.

Skolemization is accomplished as follows: -

 If the first (leftmost) quantifier in an expression is an existential quantifier, replace all
occurrences of the variable it quantifier with an arbitrary constant not appearing
elsewhere and delete the quantifier. The same procedure should be followed for all other
existential quantifiers not preceded by a universal quantifier, in each case, using different
constant symbols in the substitution.
  For each existential quantifier that is preceded by one or more universal quantifiers (is
within the scope of one or more universal quantifiers) replace all occurrences of the
existentially quantified variable by a function symbol not appearing elsewhere in the
expression. The argument assigned to the function should match all the variables
appearing in each universal quantifier which preceded the existential quantifier. This
existential quantifier should then be deleted. The same procedure should be repeated for
each remaining existential quantifier using a different function symbol and choosing
function arguments that correspond to all universally quantified variables that precede the
existentially quantified variable being replaced.

Example of Skolemization
Consider “Everyone has a heart”:

Λ Has (x, y)

If we just replaced y with a constant, H, we would get,

Λ Has (x, H)

Which says that everyone has the same heart H.? We need to say that the heart they have is not
necessarily shared, that is, it can be found by applying to each person a function that maps from person
to heart:

Λ Has (x, F(x))

Where F is a function name that does not appear elsewhere in the KB. F is called a Skolem
Function. In general, the existentially quantified variable is replaced by a term that consists of a Skolem
Function applied to all the variables universally quantified outside the existential quantifier in question.
Skolemization eliminates all existentially quantified variables, so we are now free to drop the universal
quantifiers, because any variable must be universally quantified.
6. Give the classification of different types of tasks of AI.
Ans. One possible classification of AI tasks is into 3 classes: Mundane tasks, Formal tasks and Expert
tasks.
 Mundane Tasks
o Perception
o Vision
o Speech
o Natural Language understanding, generation and translation
o Common-sense Reasoning
o Simple reasoning and logical symbol manipulation
o Robot Control
 Formal Tasks
o Games
 Chess
 Backgammon
 Draughts
 GO
o Mathematics
 Geometry and Logic
Logic Theorist: - It proved mathematical theorems. It actually proved several
theorems from Classical Math Textbooks.
 Integral Calculus
Programs such as Mathematical and Mathcad and perform complicated
symbolic integration and differentiation.
o Proving properties of Programs e.g. correctness
 Expert Tasks
o Engineering
 Design
 Fault Finding
  Manufacturing
 Planning
 Scientific Analysis
 Medical Diagnosis

7. Explain briefly the process of matching production rules against working memory.

Ans. Production systems may vary on the expressive power of conditions in production rules.
Accordingly, the pattern matching algorithm which collects production rules with matched conditions
may range from the naïve-trying all rules in sequence, stopping at the first match-to the optimized, in
which rules are “compiled” into a network of inter-related conditions.

The latter is illustrated by the RETE algorithm, designed by Charles L. Forgy in 1983, which is used
in a series of production systems, called OPS and originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University
culminating in OPS5 in the early eighties. OPS5 may be viewed as a full-fledged programming
language for production system programming.

8. Comment on “Best-First is a combination of depth first and breadth first searches.

Ans. Depth first is good because a solution can be found without computing all nods and breadth first
is good because it does not get trapped in dead ends. The best first search allows us to switch
between paths thus gaining the benefit of both approaches. At each step the most promising node is
chosen. If one of the nodes chosen generates nodes that are less promising it is possible to choose
another at the same level and in effect the search changes from depth to breadth. If on analysis these
are no better than this previously unexpanded node and branch is not forgotten and the search
method reverts to the descendants of the first choice and proceeds, backtracking as it were.

9. Explain the properties of knowledge representation systems.

Ans. The following properties should be possessed by a knowledge representation system: -

 Representational Adequacy the ability to represent the required knowledge.

  Inferential Adequacy the ability to manipulate the knowledge represented to produce new
knowledge corresponding to that inferred from the original.

 Inferential Efficiency the ability to direct the inferential mechanisms into the most productive
directions by storing appropriate guides.

 Acquisition Efficiency the ability to acquire new knowledge using automatic methods
wherever possible rather than reliance on human intervention.

10. Explain the different strategies for the selection of clauses to be resolved.

Ans. Many different strategies have been tried for selecting the clauses to be resolved. These
includes: -

 Level saturation or two-pointer method: - The outer pointer starts at the negated conclusion: the
inner pointer starts at the first clause. The two clauses denoted by the pointers are resolved if
possible, with the result added to the end of the list of clauses. The inner pointer is incremented
to the next clause until it reaches the outer pointer; then the outer pointer is incremented and
the inner pointer is reset to the front. The two-pointer method is a breadth-first method that will
generate many duplicate clauses.

 Set of Support: - One clause in each resolution step must be part of the negated conclusion or a
clause derived from it. This can be combined with the two-pointer method by putting the clauses
from the negated conclusion at the end of the list. Set-of-support keeps the proof process focused
on the theorem to be proved rather than trying to prove everything.

 Unit Preference: Clauses are prioritized, with unit clauses preferred, or more generally, shorter
clauses preferred. Resolution with a unit clause makes the result smaller.

 Linear Resolution: - One clause in each step must be the result of the previous step. This is a
depth-first strategy. It may be necessary to back up to a previous clause if no resolution with the
current clause is possible.