Lecture 1 Introduction to knowledge-base intelligent systems ■ Intelligent machines, or what machines can do ■ The history of artificial intelligence or from the “Dark Ages” to knowledge-based systems ■ Summary  Negnevitsky, Pearson Education, 2002 1 Intelligent machines, or what machines can do ■ Philosophers have been trying for over 2000 years to understand and resolve two Big Questions of the Universe: How does a human mind work, and Can non-humans have minds? These questions are still unanswered. ■ Intelligence is their ability to understand and learn things. 2 Intelligence is the ability to think and understand instead of doing things by instinct or automatically. (Essential English Dictionary, Collins, London, 1990)  Negnevitsky, Pearson Education, 2002 2 ■ In order to think, someone or something has to have a brain, or an organ that enables someone or something to learn and understand things, to solve problems and to make decisions. So we can define intelligence as the ability to learn and understand, to solve problems and to make decisions. ■ The goal of artificial intelligence (AI) as a science is to make machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans. Therefore, the answer to the question Can Machines Think? was vitally important to the discipline. ■ The answer is not a simple “Yes” or “No”.  Negnevitsky, Pearson Education, 2002 3 ■ Some people are smarter in some ways than others. Sometimes we make very intelligent decisions but sometimes we also make very silly mistakes. Some of us deal with complex mathematical and engineering problems but are moronic in philosophy and history. Some people are good at making money, while others are better at spending it. As humans, we all have the ability to learn and understand, to solve problems and to make decisions; however, our abilities are not equal and lie in different areas. Therefore, we should expect that if machines can think, some of them might be smarter than others in