SAKARYA UNIVERSITY INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING

Systems and Agent Systems Engineering HW1:Differences between Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems Instructor: Prof.Dr.Harun TAŞKIN By:Kerim GÖZTEPE 0650D06003 SAKARYA, FALL 2006

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1.ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that deals with intelligent behavior, learning, and adaptation in machines. Research in AI is concerned with producing machines to automate tasks requiring intelligent behavior. Examples include control, planning and scheduling, the ability to answer diagnostic and consumer questions, handwriting, speech, and facial recognition. As such, it has become an engineering discipline, focused on providing solutions to real life problems, software applications, traditional strategy games like computer chess and other video games. AI divides roughly into two schools of thought: Conventional AI and Computational Intelligence (CI). Conventional AI mostly involves methods now classified as machine learning, characterized by formalism and statistical analysis. This is also known as symbolic AI, logical AI, neat AI and Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI). Methods include: •

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Expert systems: apply reasoning capabilities to reach a conclusion. An expert system can process large amounts of known information and provide conclusions based on them. Case based reasoning Bayesian networks Behavior based AI: a modular method of building AI systems by hand.

Computational Intelligence involves iterative development or learning (e.g. parameter tuning e.g. in connectionist systems). Learning is based on empirical data and is associated with non-symbolic AI, scruffy AI and soft computing. Methods mainly include: • • •

Neural networks: systems with very strong pattern recognition capabilities. Fuzzy systems: techniques for reasoning under uncertainty, have been widely used in modern industrial and consumer product control systems. Evolutionary computation: applies biologically inspired concepts such as populations, mutation and survival of the fittest to generate increasingly better solutions to the problem. These methods most notably divide into evolutionary algorithms (e.g. genetic algorithms) and swarm intelligence (e.g. ant algorithms).

With hybrid intelligent systems attempts are made to combine these two groups. Expert inference rules can be generated through neural network or production rules from statistical learning such as in ACT-R. It is thought that the human brain uses multiple techniques to both formulate and cross-check results. Thus, integration is seen as promising and perhaps necessary for true AI.

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A promising new approach called intelligence amplification tries to achieve artificial intelligence in an evolutionary development process as a side-effect of amplifying human intelligence through technology. 1.1 History Early in the 17th century, René Descartes envisioned the bodies of animals as complex but reducible machines, thus formulating the mechanistic theory, also known as the "clockwork paradigm". Wilhelm Schickard created the first mechanical digital calculating machine in 1623, followed by machines of Blaise Pascal (1643) and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1671), who also invented the binary system. In the 19th century, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace worked on programmable mechanical calculating machines. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead published Principia Mathematica in 1910-1913, which revolutionized formal logic. In 1931 Kurt Gödel showed that sufficiently powerful consistent formal systems contain true theorems unprovable by any theorem-proving AI that is systematically deriving all possible theorems from the axioms. In 1941 Konrad Zuse built the first working program-controlled computers. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity (1943), laying the foundations for neural networks. Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948) popularizes the term "cybernetics". The 1950s were a period of active efforts in AI. In 1950, Alan Turing introduced the "Turing test" as a way of operationalizing a test of intelligent behavior. The first working AI programs were written in 1951 to run on the Ferranti Mark I machine of the University of Manchester: a draughts-playing program written by Christopher Strachey and a chess-playing program written by Dietrich Prinz. John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" at the first conference devoted to the subject, in 1956. He also invented the Lisp programming language. Joseph Weizenbaum built ELIZA, a chatterbot implementing Rogerian psychotherapy. At the same time, John von Neumann, who had been hired by the RAND Corporation, developed the game theory, which would prove invaluable in the progress of AI research. During the 1960s and 1970s, Joel Moses demonstrated the power of symbolic reasoning for integration problems in the Macsyma program, the first successful knowledge-based program in mathematics. Leonard Uhr and Charles Vossler published "A Pattern Recognition Program That Generates, Evaluates, and Adjusts Its Own Operators" in 1963, which described one of the first machine learning programs that could adaptively acquire and modify features and thereby overcome the limitations of simple perceptrons of Rosenblatt. Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published Perceptrons, which demonstrated the limits of simple neural nets. Alain Colmerauer developed the Prolog computer language. Ted

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Shortliffe demonstrated the power of rule-based systems for knowledge representation and inference in medical diagnosis and therapy in what is sometimes called the first expert system. Hans Moravec developed the first computer-controlled vehicle to autonomously negotiate cluttered obstacle courses. In the 1980s, neural networks became widely used due to the backpropagation algorithm, first described by Paul Werbos in 1974. The team of Ernst Dickmanns built the first robot cars, driving up to 55 mph on empty streets. The 1990s marked major achievements in many areas of AI and demonstrations of various applications. In 1995, one of Dickmanns' robot cars drove more than 1000 miles in traffic at up to 110 mph. Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer, beat Garry Kasparov in a famous six-game match in 1997. DARPA stated that the costs saved by implementing AI methods for scheduling units in the first Persian Gulf War have repaid the US government's entire investment in AI research since the 1950s. Honda built the first prototypes of humanoid robots like the one depicted above. During the 1990s and 2000s AI has become very influenced by probability theory and statistics. Bayesian networks are the focus of this movement, providing links to more rigorous topics in statistics and engineering such as Markov models and Kalman filters, and bridging the divide between `neat' and `scruffy' approaches. The last few years have also seen a big interest in game theory applied to AI decision making. This new school of AI is sometimes called `machine learning'. After the September 11, 2001 attacks there has been much renewed interest and funding for threat-detection AI systems, including machine vision research and data-mining. The DARPA Grand Challenge is a race for a $2 million prize where cars drive themselves across several hundred miles of challenging desert terrain without any communication with humans, using GPS, computers and a sophisticated array of sensors. In 2005 the winning vehicles completed all 132 miles of the course. In the post-dot com boom era, websites such as 'Ask Jeeves' and 'Ask Cheggers.com' have sprung up that use a simple form of AI to provide answers to questions by searching the internet. 1.2 Philosophy The strong AI vs. weak AI debate ("can a man-made artifact be conscious?") is still a hot topic amongst AI philosophers. This involves philosophy of mind and the mind-body problem. Most notably Roger Penrose in his book The Emperor's New Mind and John Searle with his "Chinese room" thought experiment argue that true consciousness cannot be achieved by formal logic systems, while Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach and Daniel Dennett in

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Consciousness Explained argue in favour of functionalism. In many strong AI supporters’ opinion, artificial consciousness is considered as the holy grail of artificial intelligence. Edsger Dijkstra famously opined that the debate had little importance: "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." Epistemology, the study of knowledge, also makes contact with AI, as engineers find themselves debating similar questions to philosophers about how best to represent and use knowledge and information. (e.g. semantic networks). 1.3 Applications of AI Here are the some applications of AI. 1.3.1 Game Playing You can buy machines that can play master level chess for a few hundred dollars. There is some AI in them, but they play well against people mainly through brute force computation--looking at hundreds of thousands of positions. To beat a world champion by brute force and known reliable heuristics requires being able to look at 200 million positions per second. 1.3.2 Speech Recognition In the 1990s, computer speech recognition reached a practical level for limited purposes. Thus United Airlines has replaced its keyboard tree for flight information by a system using speech recognition of flight numbers and city names. It is quite convenient. On the the other hand, while it is possible to instruct some computers using speech, most users have gone back to the keyboard and the mouse as still more convenient. 1.3.3 Understanding Natural Language Just getting a sequence of words into a computer is not enough. Parsing sentences is not enough either. The computer has to be provided with an understanding of the domain the text is about, and this is presently possible only for very limited domains. 1.3.4 Computer Vision The world is composed of three-dimensional objects, but the inputs to the human eye and computers' TV cameras are two dimensional. Some useful programs can work solely in two dimensions, but full computer vision requires partial three-dimensional information that is not just a set of two-dimensional views. At present there are only limited ways of representing three-dimensional information directly, and they are not as good as what humans evidently use.

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1.3.5 Expert Systems A ``knowledge engineer'' interviews experts in a certain domain and tries to embody their knowledge in a computer program for carrying out some task. How well this works depends on whether the intellectual mechanisms required for the task are within the present state of AI. When this turned out not to be so, there were many disappointing results. One of the first expert systems was MYCIN in 1974, which diagnosed bacterial infections of the blood and suggested treatments. It did better than medical students or practicing doctors, provided its limitations were observed. Namely, its ontology included bacteria, symptoms, and treatments and did not include patients, doctors, hospitals, death, recovery, and events occurring in time. Its interactions depended on a single patient being considered. Since the experts consulted by the knowledge engineers knew about patients, doctors, death, recovery, etc., it is clear that the knowledge engineers forced what the experts told them into a predetermined framework. In the present state of AI, this has to be true. The usefulness of current expert systems depends on their users having common sense. 1.3.6 Heuristic Classification One of the most feasible kinds of expert system given the present knowledge of AI is to put some information in one of a fixed set of categories using several sources of information. An example is advising whether to accept a proposed credit card purchase. Information is available about the owner of the credit card, his record of payment and also about the item he is buying and about the establishment from which he is buying it (e.g., about whether there have been previous credit card frauds at this establishment). 1.4 Branches of AI The branches of AI. Here are a list, but some branches are surely missing, because no-one has identified them yet. Some of these may be regarded as concepts or topics rather than full branches. 1.4.1 Logical AI What a program knows about the world in general the facts of the specific situation in which it must act, and its goals are all represented by sentences of some mathematical logical language. The program decides what to do by inferring that certain actions are appropriate for achieving its goals.

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1.4.2 Search AI programs often examine large numbers of possibilities, e.g. moves in a chess game or inferences by a theorem proving program. Discoveries are continually made about how to do this more efficiently in various domains. 1.4.3 Pattern Recognition When a program makes observations of some kind, it is often programmed to compare what it sees with a pattern. For example, a vision program may try to match a pattern of eyes and a nose in a scene in order to find a face. More complex patterns, e.g. in a natural language text, in a chess position, or in the history of some event are also studied. These more complex patterns require quite different methods than do the simple patterns that have been studied the most. 1.4.4 Representation Facts about the world have to be represented in some way. Usually languages of mathematical logic are used. 1.4.5 Inference From some facts, others can be inferred. Mathematical logical deduction is adequate for some purposes, but new methods of non-monotonic inference have been added to logic since the 1970s. The simplest kind of non-monotonic reasoning is default reasoning in which a conclusion is to be inferred by default, but the conclusion can be withdrawn if there is evidence to the contrary. For example, when we hear of a bird, we man infer that it can fly, but this conclusion can be reversed when we hear that it is a penguin. It is the possibility that a conclusion may have to be withdrawn that constitutes the non-monotonic character of the reasoning. Ordinary logical reasoning is monotonic in that the set of conclusions that can the drawn from a set of premises is a monotonic increasing function of the premises. Circumscription is another form of nonmonotonic reasoning. 1.4.6 Common Sense Knowledge And Reasoning This is the area in which AI is farthest from human-level, in spite of the fact that it has been an active research area since the 1950s. While there has been considerable progress, e.g. in developing systems of non-monotonic reasoning and theories of action, yet more new ideas are needed. The Cyc system contains a large but spotty collection of common sense facts.

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1.4.7 Learning From Experience Programs do that. The approaches to AI based on connectionism and neural nets specialize in that. There is also learning of laws expressed in logic. [Mit97] is a comprehensive undergraduate text on machine learning. Programs can only learn what facts or behaviors their formalisms can represent, and unfortunately learning systems are almost all based on very limited abilities to represent information. 1.4.8 Planning Planning programs start with general facts about the world (especially facts about the effects of actions), facts about the particular situation and a statement of a goal. From these, they generate a strategy for achieving the goal. In the most common cases, the strategy is just a sequence of actions. 1.4.9 Epistemology This is a study of the kinds of knowledge that are required for solving problems in the world. 1.4.10 Ontology Ontology is the study of the kinds of things that exist. In AI, the programs and sentences deal with various kinds of objects, and we study what these kinds are and what their basic properties are. Emphasis on ontology begins in the 1990s. 1.4.11 Heuristics A heuristic is a way of trying to discover something or an idea imbedded in a program. The term is used variously in AI. Heuristic functions are used in some approaches to search to measure how far a node in a search tree seems to be from a goal. Heuristic predicates that compare two nodes in a search tree to see if one is better than the other, i.e. constitutes an advance toward the goal, may be more useful. 1.4.12 Genetic Programming Genetic programming is a technique for getting programs to solve a task by mating random Lisp programs and selecting fittest in millions of generations. It is being developed by John Koza's group and here's a tutorial.

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2. MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM (MAS) In computer science, a multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of several agents, collectively capable of reaching goals that are difficult to achieve by an individual agent or monolithic system. The exact nature of the agents is a matter of some controversy. They are sometimes claimed to be autonomous. For example a household floor cleaning robot can be autonomous in that it is dependent only on a human operator to start it up. On the other hand, in practice, all agents are under active human supervision. Furthermore, the more important the activities of the agent are to humans, the more supervision that they receive. In fact, autonomy is seldom desired. Instead interdependent systems are needed. MAS can be claimed to include human agents as well. Human organizations and society in general can be considered an example of a multiagent system. Multi-agent systems can manifest self-organization and complex behaviors even when the individual strategies of all their agents are simple. Topics of research in MAS include: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Beliefs, Desires, And Intentions (BDI), Cooperation And Coordination, Organisation, Communication, Negotiation, Distributed Problem Solving, Multi-Agent Learning. Scientific Communities Dependability And Fault-Tolerance

To share knowledge agents can use Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML) or FIPA's Agent Communication Language (ACL). In fact, to be a bit recursive in our analysis, the wikipedia itself can be considered a multi-agent system. To further understand multiagent systems within the context of a specific example, below is an analysis of wikipedia as an MAS.

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2.1 Multiagent Systems Engineering Methodology The Multiagent System Engineering (MaSE) methodology, takes an initial system specification, and produces a set of formal design documents in a graphically based style. The primary focus of MaSE is to guide a designer through the software lifecycle from a prose specification to an implemented agent system. MaSE is independent of a particular multiagent system architecture, agent architecture, programming language, or message-passing system. A system designed in MaSE could be implemented in several different ways from the same design. MaSE also offers the ability to track changes throughout the process. Every design object can be traced forward or backward through the different phases of the methodology and their corresponding constructs. An overview of the methodology and models is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Methodology And Models

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2.1.1Capturing Goals The first phase in MaSE is Capturing Goals, which takes the initial system specification and transforms it into a structured set of system goals as shown in a Goal Hierarchy Diagram (Figure 2). This phase of MaSE is drawn in a large part from analysis patterns in .In the MaSE methodology, a goal is always defined as a system-level objective. Lower-level constructs may inherit or be responsible for goals, but goals always have a system-level context.

Figure 2:Goal Hierarchy Diagram

2.2 MAS Applications MAS has been successfully applied in numerous graduate-level projects as well as several research projects. The Multi-Agent Distributed Goal Satisfaction project is a collaborative effort between AFIT, the University of Connecticut, and Wright State University where MAS is being used to design the collaborative agent framework to integrate different constraint satisfaction and planning systems. The Agent-Based Mixed-Initiative Collaboration project is also using MAS to design a multiagent system focused on distributed human and machine planning. MAS has been used successfully to design an agent-based heterogeneous database integration system as well as a multi-agent approach to a biologically based computer virus immune system.

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2.3 Main Differences Between AI And MAS • •

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In computer science, a multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of several agents, collectively capable of reaching goals that are difficult to achieve by an individual agent or monolithic system. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that deals with intelligent behavior, learning, and adaptation in machines. Research in AI is concerned with producing machines to automate tasks requiring intelligent behavior. Examples include control, planning and scheduling, the ability to answer diagnostic and consumer questions, handwriting, speech, and facial recognition. The advent of multiagent systems has brought together many disciplines in an effort to build distributed, intelligent, and robust applications. They have given us a new way to look at distributed systems and provided a path to more robust intelligent applications. Many of our traditional ways of thinking about and designing software do not fit the multiagent paradigm. Over the past few years, there have been several attempts at creating tools and methodologies for building such systems. Unfortunately, many of the tools focused on specific agent architectures or have not gone to the necessary level of detail to adequately support complex system development. Constructing multiagent systems is difficult. They have all the problems of traditional distributed, concurrent systems, plus the additional difficulties that arise from flexibility requirements and sophisticated interactions. There is a lack of a proven methodology enabling designers to clearly structure applications as multiagent systems. There are no general case industrial-strength toolkits that are flexible enough to specify the numerous characteristics of agents. MSA builds upon the work of many agent-based approaches; it takes many ideas and combines them into a complete, end-to-end methodology. Multi-agent systems can manifest self-organization and complex behaviors even when the individual strategies of all their agents are simple.

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