6.9. representations#

Some notes on knowledge representation based on Berkeley’s CS 188 course and “Artificial Intelligence” Russel & Norvig 3rd Edition

6.9.1. intro#

  • AI - field of study which studies the goal of creating intelligence

    • intelligent agent - system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success

  • expert task examples - medical diagnosis, equipment repair, computer configuration, financial planning

  1. formal systems - use axioms and formal logic

  2. ontologies - structuring knowledge in graph form

  3. statistical methods

  • turing test - is human mind deterministic { turing1950computing }

  • chinese room argument - rebuts turing test { cite searle1980minds }

  • china brain - what if different people hit buttons to fire individual neurons

  • Polanyi’s paradox: “we can know more than we can tell”

6.9.3. knowledge representation#

  • physical symbol system hypothesis - a physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action

    • computers and minds are both physical symbol systems

    • symbol - meaningful pattern that can be manipulated

    • symbol system - creates, modifies, destroys symbols

  • want to represent

    1. meta-knowledge - knowledge about what we know

    2. objects - facts

    3. performance - knowledge about how to do things

    4. events - actions

  • two levels

    1. knowledge level - where facts are described

    2. symbol level - lower

  • properties

    1. representational adequacy - ability to represent

    2. inferential adequacy

    3. inferential efficiency

    4. acquisitional efficiency - acquire new information

  • two views of knowledge

    1. logic

    • a logic is a language with concrete rules

    • syntax - rules for constructing legal logic

    • semantics - how we interpret / read

      • assigns a meaning

    • multi-valued logic - not just booleans

    • higher-order logic - functions / predicates are also objects

    • multi-valued logics - more than 2 truth values

      • fuzzy logic - uses probabilities rather than booleans

    • match-resolve-act cycle

    1. associationist

    • knowledge based on observation

      • semantic networks - objects and relationships between them - like is a, can, has

      • graphical representation

      • equivalent to logical statements

      • ex. nlp - conceptual dependency theory - sentences with same meaning have same graphs

      • frame representations - semantic networks where nodes have structure

        • ex. each frame has age, height, weight, …

      • when agent faces new situation - slots can be filled in, may trigger actions / retrieval of other frames

      • inheritance of properties between frames

      • frames can contain relationships and procedures to carry out after various slots filled

  • statistical

    • distributed - usually different from sparse code (sparser generally less robust)

      • opposite of sparse code = dense code

      • have to check multiple indexes

      • penti’s work: distributed

      • usually want these to be robust

      • nlp is main place where unsupervised pretraining widely used

    • hierarchical

    • good representations - linearly separable

    • representation that factors

    • information bottleneck method: want simple representation that keeps class but throws away lots of extraneous info

6.9.4. expert systems#

  • expert system - program that contains some of the subject-specific knowledge of one or more human experts.

  • problems

    1. planning

    2. monitoring

    3. instruction

    4. control

  • need lots of knowledge to be intelligent

  • rule-based architecture - condition-action rules & database of facts

  • acquire new facts

    • from human operator

    • interacting with environment directly

  • forward chaining

    • until special HALT symbol in DB, keep following logical rule, add result to DB

  • conflict resolution - which rule to apply when many choices available

  • pattern matching - logic in the if statements

  • backward chaining - check if something is true

    • check database

    • check if on the right side of any facts

  • CLIPS - expert system shell

    • define rules and functions…

  • explanation subsystem - provide explanation of reasoning that led to conclusion

  • people

    1. knowledge engineer - computer scientist who designs / implements ai

    2. domain expert - has domain knowledge

  1. user interface

  2. knowledge engineering - art of designing and building expert systems

  • determine characteristics of problem

  • automatic knowledge-acquisition - set of techniques for gaining new knowledge

    • ex. parse Wikipedia

    • crowdsourcing

  • creating an expert system can be very hard

    • only useful when expert isn’t available, problem uses symbolic reasoning, problem is well-structured

  • MYCIN - one of first successful expert systems { cite shortliffe2012computer }

    • Stanford in 1970s

    • used backward chaining but would ask patient questions - sometimes too many questions

  • advantages

    • can explain reasoning

    • can free up human experts to deal with rare problems

6.9.5. Godel, Escher, Bach#

Douglas Hofstadter, 1979

6.9.5.1. meta#

  • strange loop = paradox - self-referential

  • zen enlightenment

    • goal: transcend dualism = division into concepts (perception, words do this)

    • words give you some truth but always fail to describe some parts of the truth

6.9.5.2. music#

  • canons - repeat w/ subtle changes (e.g. pitch shift)

  • fugue - repeat w/ more substantial changes

6.9.5.3. ai#

  • essential abilities - can we do these things unsupervised?

    • to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation

    • to find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them;

    • to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them

    • to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them together in new ways

  • intelligence consists of rules at different levels

    • “just plain” rules - like reflexes which respond to stereotyped situations

    • metarules - when situations are mixtures of steretoyped situations, requires rules for deciding which “just plain” rules to apply

    • rules for inventing new rules - when situations can’t be classified

      • rules may have to change themselves

  • messages - comparison of DNA to a jukebox

    • where is info stored? records? buttons? smashed buttons?

    • what could constitute a Rosetta stone for DNA codes?

    • 3 parts

      • frame - tells you that this is a message

      • outer - tells you how to read a message (e.g. language, style)

      • inner - actual content

    • if decoding is universal, we might call the outer message (e.g. the trigger) the message

  • memory - same bits can be used for different things - part of each message specifies the instruction type

6.9.5.4. brain#

  • intelligence involves a calculus of descriptions = symbols

    • symbols represent both classes + instances (maybe both depending on amount of activation / context) - def need some context

    • can have links to other symbols (+priors on these)

    • top-down logical structure??

    • different ways to combine symbols get blurry

      • symbols can be learned to branch, merge

    • can harness temporal firing rates to encode more

    • can grow incrementally (greedily)

  • analogy of thoughts as trips on a (poorly fleshed out) map

6.9.5.5. interpretation#

  • ex. top is decimal expansion of the sum of the second (\(\pi/4\))

    • 7, 8, 5, 3, 9, 8, 1, 6, …

    • 1, -1/3, +1/5, -1/7, +1/9, -1/11…

6.9.5.6. math / logic#

  • godel’s thm - limitation of any formal axiomatic system: cannot make a program to find a complete + consistent set of axioms

  • church-turing thesis - a function on the natural numbers can be calculated by an effective method if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine

    • no system can do computation which cannot be broken down into simple elements

  • decision procedure - decides whether something is a theorem - must terminate

  • we can think of theorems as strings in a formal system

  • interpretation - correspondence between symbols and words

    • ideally, these are meaningful isomorphisms between codes and reality

    • not all interpretations imply meaningful (or valid) corresponding codes

    • there might be multiple, equally valid interpretations

    • consistency depends on interpretation:

    • consistency - when every theorem, upon interpretation, comes out true (in some imaginable world)

    • completeness - when all statements which are true (in some imageinable world), and which can be expressed as well-formed strings of the system, are theorems

  • slightly different axioms lead to elliptical/hyperbolic geometry instead of Euclidean geometry

  • godel numbering - can replace all symbols w/ numbers and all typographic rules w/ arithmetic rules

  • 2 key idesas

    • strings can speak about other strings

    • self-scrutiny can be entire concentrated into a single string

  • every aspect of thinking can be viewed as a high-level description of a system which, on a low level, is governed by simple, even formal rules

6.9.5.7. causality#

  • what counterfactuals are the most realistic

    • different things are stable at different levels

6.9.5.8. biology#

  • dna -> rna -> proteins = sequence of amino acids

    • folds w/ valrious levels of structure (like music)

  • self-rep - what counts?

    • quine? instructions on jukebox? human reproduction?