Lecture Notes

Course: B.Tech. III Year I Semester

Subject: Artifical Intelligence
Course Objectives: To train the students to understand
different types of AI agents, various AI search algorithms,
fundamentals of knowledge epresentation, buildi
ng of simple knowledge-based systems and to apply
knowledge representation, reasoning. Study of Markov
Models enable the student ready to step into applied AI.

Dr.Y.L Malathi Latha

Artificial Intelligence
Unit-IV

Syllubus
Learning: What Is Learning? Rote Learning, Learning by Taking Advice, Learning in Problem Solving,
Learning from Examples, Winston’s Learning Program, Decision Trees.
 Learning
Introduction
Learning covers a wide range of phenomena. At one end of the spectrum is skill
refinement. People get better at many tasks simply by practicing. The more you
ride a bicycle or play tennis, the better you get. At the other end of the spectrum
lies knowledge acquisition. As we have seen, many AI programs draw heavily on
knowledge as their source of power. Knowledge is generally acquired through
experience and such acquisition is the focus of this chapter.

What is learning?

• According to Herbert Simon, learning denotes changes in a

system that enable a system to do the same task more
efficiently the next time.
• Arthur Samuel stated that, "Machine learning is the subfield of
computer science, that gives computers the ability to learn
without being explicitly programmed ".
• In 1997, Mitchell proposed that, " A computer program is said
to learn from experience 'E' with respect to some class of
tasks 'T' and performance measure 'P', if its performance at
tasks in 'T', as measured by 'P', improves with experience E ".
• The main purpose of machine learning is to study and design the
algorithms that can be used to produce the predicates from the
given dataset.
• Besides these, the machine learning includes the agents
percepts for acting as well as to improve their future
performance.
The following tasks must be learned by an agent.

To predict or decide the result state for an action.

• To know the values for each state(understand which state has

high or low vale).
• To keep record of relevant percepts.

Why do machine need learn?

1. Understand and improve efficiency of human being.

2. Discover new things or structure that is unknown to humans
3. Fill in skeleton or incomplete about the domain
Advantages of learning

1. Skill refinement: practice make skill improve- More you playtennis, better you get
2. Knowledge acquisition: Knowledge is generally acquired by experience.

Different form of Learning:

Various forms of learnings are

1. Rote Learning
2. Learning by Taking Advice,
3. Learning in Problem Solving
4. Learning from Examples
5. Learning with Macro-Operators

1. Rote learning:

Rote Learning is basically memorisation.

• Saving knowledge so it can be used again.

• Retrieval is the only problem.
 • No repeated computation, inference or query is necessary.

A simple example of rote learning is caching

When a computer stores a piece of data, it is performing a rudimentary form of

learning.
•In case of data caching, we store computed values so that we donot have to
recompute them later.
•When computation is more expensive than recall, this strategy can save a
significant amount of time.
•Caching has been used in AI programs to produce some surprising performance
improvements.
•Such caching is known as rote learning.

• Store computed values (or large piece of data)

• Recall this information when required by computation.
• Significant time savings can be achieved.
• Many AI programs (as well as more general ones) have used caching very
effectively.

Memorisation is a key necessity for learning:

• It is a basic necessity for any intelligent program -- is it a separate learning

process?
• Memorisation can be a complex subject -- how best to store knowledge?

Samuel's Checkers program employed rote learning (it also used parameter
adjustment which will be discussed shortly).

• A minimax search was used to explore the game tree.

• Time constraints do not permit complete searches.
• It records board positions and scores at search ends.
• Now if the same board position arises later in the game the stored value can be
recalled and the end effect is that more deeper searched have occurred.

Rote learning is basically a simple process. However it does illustrate some issues that
are relevant to more complex learning issues.

Rote learning does not involve any sophisticated problem-solving capabilities.

•It shows the need for some capabilities required of complex learning systems such
as:
Organisation
-- access of the stored value must be faster than it would be to recompute it.
Methods such as hashing, indexing and sorting can be employed to enable this.

E.g Samuel's program indexed board positions by noting the number of pieces.

Generalisation
-- The number of potentially stored objects can be very large. We may need to
generalise some information to make the problem manageable.

E.g Samuel's program stored game positions only for white to move. Also
rotations along diagonals are combined.

Stability of the Environment

-- Rote learning is not very effective in a rapidly changing environment. If the
environment does change then we must detect and record exactly what has
changed -- the frame problem.

2. Learning by taking Advice

• This type is the easiest and simple way of learning.

• In this type of learning, a programmer writes a program to give some
instructions to perform a task to the computer. Once it is learned (i.e.
programmed), the system will be able to do new things.
• Also, there can be several sources for taking advice such as humans(experts),
internet etc.
• However, this type of learning has a more necessity of inference than rote learning.
• As the stored knowledge in knowledge base gets transformed into an
operational form, the reliability of the knowledge source is always taken
into consideration.

There are two basic approaches to advice taking:

• Take high level, abstract advice and convert it into rules that can guide
performance elements of the system. Automate all aspects of advice taking
• Develop sophisticated tools such as knowledge base editors and debugging.
These are used to aid an expert to translate his expertise into detailed rules.
Here the expert is an integral part of the learning system. Such tools are
important in expert systems area of AI.
Automated Advice Taking

The following steps summaries this method:

Request

-- This can be simple question asking about general advice or more

complicated by identifying shortcomings in the knowledge base and asking for
a remedy.

Interpret

-- Translate the advice into an internal representation.

Operationalise

-- Translated advice may still not be usable so this stage seeks to provide a
representation that can be used by the performance element.

Integrate

-- When knowledge is added to the knowledge base care must be taken so

that bad side-effects are avoided.

E.g. Introduction of redundancy and contradictions.

Evaluate

-- The system must assess the new knowledge for errors, contradictions etc.

The steps can be iterated.

Knowledge Base Maintenance

Instead of automating the five steps above, many researchers have instead assembled
tools that aid the development and maintenance of the knowledge base.

Many have concentrated on:

• Providing intelligent editors and flexible representation languages for

integrating new knowledge.
 • Providing debugging tools for evaluating, finding contradictions and
redundancy in the existing knowledge base.

EMYCIN is an example of such a system.

Example Learning System - FOO

Learning the game of hearts

FOO (First Operational Operationaliser) tries to convert high level advice (principles,
problems, methods) into effective executable (LISP) procedures.

Hearts:

• Game played as a series of tricks.

• One player - who has the lead - plays a card.
• Other players follow in turn and play a card.
o The player must follow suit.
o If he cannot he play any of his cards.
• The player who plays the highest value card wins the trick and the lead.
• The winning player takes the cards played in the trick.
• The aim is to avoid taking points. Each heart counts as one point the queen of
spades is worth 13 points.
• The winner is the person that after all tricks have been played has the lowest
points score.

Hearts is a game of partial information with no known algorithm for winning.

Although the possible situations are numerous general advice can be given such as:

• Avoid taking points.

• Do not lead a high card in suit in which an opponent is void.
• If an opponent has the queen of spades try to flush it.

In order to receive advice a human must convert into a FOO representation (LISP
clause)
(avoid (take-points me) (trick))

FOO operationalises the advice by translating it into expressions it can use in the
game. It can UNFOLD avoid and then trick to give:
(achieve (not (during
(scenario
(each p1 (players) (play-card p1))
(take-trick (trick-winner)))
(take-points me))))

However the advice is still not operational since it depends on the outcome of trick
which is generally not known. Therefore FOO uses case analysis (on
the during expression) to determine which steps could case one to take points. Step 1
is ruled out and step 2's take-points is UNFOLDED:
(achieve (not (exists c1 (cards-played)
(exists c2 (point-cards)
(during (take (trick-winner) c1)
(take me c2))))))

FOO now has to decide: Under what conditions does (take me c2) occur during (take
(trick-winner) c1).

A technique, called partial matching, hypothesises that points will be taken if me =

trick-winner and c2 = c1. We can reduce our expression to:

(achieve (not (and (have-points(card-played))

(= (trick-winner) me ))))

This not quite enough a this means Do not win trick that has points. We do not know
who the trick-winner is, also we have not said anything about how to play in a trick
that has point led in the suit. After a few more steps to achieve this FOO comes up
with:
(achieve (>= (and (in-suit-led(card-of me))
(possible (trick-has-points)))
(low(card-of me)))

FOO had an initial knowledge base that was made up of:

• basic domain concepts such as trick, hand, deck suits, avoid, win etc.
• Rules and behavioural constraints -- general rules of the game.
• Heuristics as to how to UNFOLD.

FOO has 2 basic shortcomings:

• It lacks a control structure that could apply operationalisation automatically.

• It is specific to hearts and similar tasks.
 3. Learning By Problem solving

There are three basic methods in which a system can learn from its own
experiences.
Learning by Parameter Adjustment

Many programs rely on an evaluation procedure to summarise the state of

search etc. Game playing programs provide many examples of this.

However, many programs have a static evaluation function.

In learning a slight modification of the formulation of the evaluation of the problem is

required.

Here the problem has an evaluation function that is represented as a polynomial of the
form such as:

The t terms a values of features and the c terms are weights.

In designing programs it is often difficult to decide on the exact value to give each
weight initially.

So the basic idea of parameter adjustment is to:

• Start with some estimate of the correct weight settings.

• Modify the weight in the program on the basis of accumulated experiences.
• Features that appear to be good predictors will have their weights increased
and bad ones will be decreased.

Samuel's Checkers programs employed 16 such features at any one time chosen from
a pool of 38.
Learning by Macro Operators

The basic idea here is similar to Rote Learning:

Avoid expensive recomputation

Macro-operators can be used to group a whole series of actions into one.

For example: Making dinner can be described a lay the table, cook dinner, serve
dinner. We could treat laying the table as on action even though it involves a sequence
of actions.

The STRIPS problem-solving employed macro-operators in it's learning phase.

Consider a blocks world example in which ON(C,B) and ON(A,TABLE) are true.

STRIPS can achieve ON(A,B) in four steps:

UNSTACK(C,B), PUTDOWN(C), PICKUP(A), STACK(A,B)

STRIPS now builds a macro-operator MACROP with preconditions ON(C,B),

ON(A,TABLE), postconditions ON(A,B), ON(C,TABLE) and the four steps as its
body.

MACROP can now be used in future operation.

But it is not very general. The above can be easily generalised with variables used in
place of the blocks.

However generalisation is not always that easy (See Rich and Knight).

Learning by Chunking

Chunking involves similar ideas to Macro Operators and originates from

psychological ideas on memory and problem solving.

The computational basis is in production systems (studied earlier).

SOAR is a system that use production rules to represent its knowledge. It also
employs chunking to learn from experience.

Basic Outline of SOAR's Method

• SOAR solves problems it fires productions these are stored in long term
memory.
• Some firings turn out to be more useful than others.
• When SOAR detects are useful sequence of firings, it creates chunks.
• A chunk is essentially a large production that does the work of an entire
sequence of smaller ones.
• Chunks may be generalised before storing
Most often heard criticisms of AI is that machines cannotbe called intelligent until
they are able to learn to do newthings and adapt to new situations, rather than
simplydoing as they are told to do.•Some critics of AI have been saying that
computerscannot learn!•Definitions of Learning: changes in the system that
areadaptive in the sense that they enable the system to dothe same task or tasks
drawn from the same populationmore efficiently and more effectively the next
time.•Learning covers a wide range of phenomenon:–Skill refinement : Practice
makes skills improve.–Knowledge acquisition: Knowledge is generally acquired
throughexperience
Explain the importance of repeated problem solving for an effective improvement in the process of
``Learning”. Distinguish it from Learning by taking advice.

a) What is unsupervised learning? b) “Learning is the most important characteristic of

Intelligence” Jus

• What are the components of agents? (16)

• 2) Define and explain
• (i) Supervised learning (6) (ii) Unsupervised learning
(6) (iii) Reinforcement learning (4)
• 3) How hypotheses formed by pure inductive inference or
induction?Explain with ex - amples. (16)
• 4) (a) What is a decision tree? (4)
• b) Explain the process of inducing decision trees from
examples. (6)
• c) Write the decision tree learning algorithm (6)
• 5) How the performance of a learning algorithm is assessed?
Draw a learning curve for the decision tree algorithm (16)
• 6) Explain with an example
What is learning? What are its types?