The Essence of Artificial Intelligence

Chapter 1: Introduction

Top Ten Salient Sentences:

1. "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 real world."

2. "Properly understanding a visual scene similarly requires knowledge of the kinds of objects that might appear
in the scene. Solving problems in a particular domain generally requires knowledge of how to reason with that
domain - both these types of knowledge must be represented."

3. "One conclusion from artificial intelligence research is that solving even apparently simple problems usually
requires a lot of knowledge. Properly understanding a single sentence requires extensive knowledge both of
language and of the context."

4. "Artificial intelligence research makes the general assumption that human intelligence can be reduced to the
(complex) manipulation of symbols, and that it does not have to be a biological brain!"

5. "The semantics of a representation language provides a way of mapping between expressions in a formal language
and the real world."

6. "Another crucial general technique required when writting AI programs is search. Often there is no direct way
to find a solution to some problem. However, you do know how to generate possibilites."

7. "Heuristic techniques are often better, where you only try the obtions which you think (based on your current
best guess) are must likely to lead to a good solution."

8. "AI is concerned with these difficult tasks, which require complex and sophisticated reasoning processes and
knowledge."

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

10. "AI is concerned with automating both mudane and expert tasks that are generally much the hardest to automate.
We can program a computer to diagnose unusual diseases or configure a complex computer, but tasks which the average
two-year-old can do without thinking (getting around a toy-strewn room, recognizing faces, communicating, etc.) are
beyond, or at the limits of, current AI research."