Essential Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence

Summary:

This note provides an overview of the syllabus for a course on Artificial Intelligence. The syllabus is divided into three modules.

Module 1 (12 hours) covers topics such as defining the problem as a state space search, heuristic search techniques, knowledge representation using predicate logic, procedural versus declarative knowledge, symbolic reasoning under uncertainty, and weak and strong slot-and-filler structures.

Module 2 (10 hours) focuses on game playing, planning techniques, understanding as constraint satisfaction, and natural language processing, including syntactic processing, semantic analysis, and statistical natural language processing.

Module 3 (8 hours) discusses learning methods such as rote learning, learning from examples, expert systems, and knowledge acquisition.

The recommended textbook for the course is “Artificial Intelligence” by Elaine Rich, Kevin Knight, and Shivashankar B Nair. Additional references include “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems” by Dan W Patterson and “Artificial Intelligence” by S Kaushik.

These lecture notes provide a structured outline of the topics to be covered in the Artificial Intelligence course, serving as a guide for students and the instructor.

Excerpt:

Essential Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence

Module 1

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

What is Artificial Intelligence?

It is a branch of Computer Science that pursues creating computers or machines as intelligent
as human beings.

It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer
programs.

It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does
not have to confine itself to biologically observable methods

Definition: Artificial Intelligence is the study of how to make computers do things, which, at the
moment, people do better.

According to the father of Artificial Intelligence, John McCarthy, it is “The science and
engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs”.

Artificial Intelligence is a way of making a computer, a computer-controlled robot, or a
the software thinks intelligently, similar to the intelligent humans think.

AI is accomplished by studying how the human brain thinks and how humans learn, decide, and
work while trying to solve a problem, and then using the outcomes of this study as a basis of
developing intelligent software and systems.