Computer Science

Modified: 2024-02-27 10:53 AM CST

This page will introduce you to computer science and to many areas of artificial intelligence (AI). We will cover some of these areas in more depth later in the course.

Relevant Areas of Computer Science to Cognitive Science

Basics

• Algorithms (the 2021 theme) (Video)
  • An algorithm is an effective procedure and it guarantees a solution
    • Recall our inventory of the desks at SAU: COUNT THEM
    • But, not all algorithms can be finished in real time
      • In other words, we could, conceivably, count all of the sand particles at DeGray State Park Beach but it might take us several generations to do so. The algorithm works but it takes too long
      • Often, algorithms exist, but using them takes too much time
      • How long would it take to count each grain of sand at DeGray State Park Beach?
• Heuristics
  • Heuristics are solutions that might work or not. "Rules of thumb" nicely describe heuristics
    • Most human behavior is governed by heuristic rules
      • Don't mess around with Jim lyrics (Jim Croce):

• You don't tug on superman's cape
  You don't spit into the wind
  You don't pull the mask off that old lone ranger
  And you don't mess around with Jim
• Heuristics do not guarantee a solution
  • Example: is there an algorithm for picking a marriage partner? NO!
    • If there were there would be no divorce
  • So, what are some of the heuristics humans use to select marriage partners?
    • Marriage Decision Tree
      • Tongue in cheek attempt to make a decision tree about marriage
      • Includes: children, Finances, Extended Family, Social Issues, Religion, Communication/Conflict, Cultural, Household Expectations, Geography, Health, Entertainment/Interests, and Pets. WHEW!
    • Checklist from site above, a very complicated heuristic :-)

History of Computer Science

• Video shows from abacus to modern computers
• Timeline of Computer Science
  • Analog Computing: uses physical properties to compute
    • Slide Rule (1622)
      • FYI, when I was in high school I had to buy one (a "slipstick") for math classes. We carried them on belt loops (talk about nerdy!). I sold mine on eBay some years ago
      • It used logarithms that were represented by scales on the slide rule to perform calculations.
    • Spirit or Bubble Level (1661)
      • Uses fluid to tell whether something is level or plumb (scroll down on that page to see the level)
    • Mercury Thermometer (1714)
    • FYI: When you adjust the temperature of your shower you are engaging in an analog process. You may add or subtract hot and cold water until you reach your ideal water temperature.
• Analog vs Digital
  • Analog devices have an infinite number of states
  • Digital devices have a finite number of states
    • Look at time as an example
      • A digital watch divides the 24 hour day into a large number of states, seconds usually
        • So, 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds = 86,400 seconds/day
      • An analog watch (hard to find now) divides the same 24 hours into an infinite number of states
      • Video of my analog watch
        • Notice that the second hand sweeps smoothly
          • The scale of an analog watch contains an infinite number of time measurements
        • If this were a digital watch the hand would jump from second to second
          • A 12 hour digital watch only contains 43,200 time measurements
• Digital Computing
  • Jacquard Loom (1801)
    • Its punch cards "programmed" it to weave patterns in cloth
  • Babbage's Analytical Engine (1822)
    • Could use punch cards, store data, and perform arithmetical calculations
  • Hollerith Tabulator (1890)
    • Enabled 1890 Census to be completed more quickly
  • Turing Machine video (1936)
    • Ideal machine that converts symbols to others depending on rules
    • Basis for today's computers
  • ABC Computer (1937)
    • At Iowa State University
    • Some claim it is the first digital computer
    • But, it was not programmable
    • Used vacuum tubes
  • ENIAC (1946)
    • First used to calculate ballistic tables for cannons
      • FYI, Angry Birds game is similar! Birds are launched just like cannon shells (angle and power)
  • Transistor (1947)
    • Replaced vacuum tubes
    • Transistor sister (Freddie Cannon (1961)Sorry, could not resist)
  • UNIVAC (1951)
    • First commercial computer
    • Used by Census Bureau
  • Integrated Circuit (1958)
    • Packed the equivalent of many transistors onto one device
  • Graphical User Interface (1964)
    • First created at Xerox PARC
    • Apple used it for Macintosh
    • Microsoft used it for Windows
  • Personal Computers (1974-1976)
    • FYI, around 1981 the Psychology Dept. bought its first PC, an Apple II Plus. Its ability to display color tipped the scales to it over a Radio Shack TRS-80
    • After we bought a Mac XL, the redesigned Lisa
    • Following that we bought Macs
    • So, while SAU has always been a heavily PC campus, Macs were present in smaller numbers too
  • Gopher
    • Text based search engine for internet
    • Immediate predecessor to HTML and WWW
  • HTML (1990): Leads to WWW
    • Here is the HTML code for part of this page:

<!<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer" title="Personal Computers">Personal Computers</a> (1974-1976)
<ul>
<li>FYI, around 1981 the Psychology Dept. bought its first PC, an Apple II Plus. Its ability to display color tipped the scales to it over a Radio Shack TRS-80</li>
<li>After we bought a Mac XL, the redesigned Lisa</li>
<li>Following that we bought Macs</li>
<li>So, while SAU has always been a heavily PC campus, Macs were present in smaller numbers too</li>
</ul>
</li>-->


• World Wide Web (WWW, 1989)
  • Invented by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau
  • HTTP-Hypertext Transfer Protocol
  • URL-Uniform Resource Locator
  • Web pages
    • Early SAU Web page (1997)
• Google Search Engine (1997)
  • A successful tool for searching the internet
  • Other search engines include:
    • Archie, W3 Catalog, Aliweb, WebCrawler, Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Bing, Yandex (in Russia), Baidu (in China), DuckDuckGo (for privacy concerns), FireFox, Safari, and many others.
• iPhone (2007)
  • Introduced touchpad interface
  • Only usable with AT&T at first
  • The first "smartphone"
• Tablets (2010-2011)
  • Preceded by pen based devices
  • Apple's iPad was the first successful tablet
• Smartwatches (video) (2015)
  • Scroll down on the page above to see short video
  • How many of you are wearing a smartwatch?
    • I got mine for free, then upgraded (and paid)
• Timeline of Computer History
  • Alan Turing
    • Alan Turing-Legacy Project
      • Be sure to watch the video on the page above
    • Definition of AI: The Turing Test (video)
      • The Turing Test defines AI as existing when a computer could successfully convince a human observer who is working at a computer that the answers to the human's questions are indistiguishable from those of a person
    • Loebner Prize
      • This contest has apparently degenerated somewhat into the creation of chatbots or computer programs that attempt to act as humans via a computer interface
      • But, ChatGPT has changed the Turing Test
      • As an example of the Turing Test they are lacking
      • Below, we'll look at examples such as Siri and Alexa
      • Turing 2.0
        • Article discusses Turing Test and speculates about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
  • Vladimir Kotelnikov
    • Discovered Sampling Theorem
    • It states that analog signals (auditory waves and visual waves) can be converted to digital signals.
    • The key is to sample digitally at least 2X the maximum frequency of the analog signal
    • The Sampling Theorem is the basis for all digital music and digital video
    • The first successful example was the movie Toy Story (1995)
  • Claude Shannon
    • One of the pioneers of information theory
    • He demonstrated that any message could be transmitted any distance IF it was repeated often enough.
    • Modern communications would not be possible without it
    • There is a video at the end of the page above
    • Biography
      • In 1985 he made an unexpected appearance at the International Information Theory Symposium in Brighton, England. The meeting was proceeding smoothly, if uneventfully, when news raced through the halls and lecture rooms that the snowy-haired man with the shy grin who was wandering in and out of the sessions was none other than Claude Shannon. Some of those at the conference had not even known he was still alive. At the banquet, the meeting's organizers somehow persuaded Shannon to address the audience. He spoke for a few minutes and then—fearing that he was boring his audience, he recalled later—pulled three balls out of his pockets and began juggling. The audience cheered and lined up for autographs. Said Robert J. McEliece, a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and chairman of the symposium: “It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference."
    Grace Hopper
    • Video
    • Moth in computer led to term debugging (picture of the moth)
    • Helped develop COBOL computer language
    • Pointed out that light travels about 11 inches in one billionth of a second (nanosecond)
      • That insight is critical in the development of fast computer circuits
  • Computer Languages History
    • Page describes: Fortran, LISP, COBOL, ASCII, BASIC, UNIX, C++, and other languages
    • Computer languages code the instructions that a computer understands
  • Time Sharing
    • Allows multiple users to each interact with the computer from separate stations
    • The computer works very quickly and users feel that they alone are interacting with the machine
  • VisiCalc
    • Precursor to Excel (ran on an Apple II, at first)
    • Was one of the first successful programs, the spreadsheet, on personal computers
  • HyperCard
    • Precursor to HTML, we will revisit later this semester and see course history
    • This course used HyperCard stacks early on and students created their own apps on it
  • PGP
    • Pretty Good Privacy, an early attempt to secure computers, we will revisit near end of course
  • iPod
    • Replaced Sony Walkman and other similar devices
  • Social Media
    • Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TicToc: social network pioneers

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Definition
  • The attempt to make computers perform intelligent actions.
    • However, the definition of what constitutes AI appears to change as it develops. In other words, when a computer does something intelligent, that performance is no longer deemed as AI.
• Subfields of AI
  • Natural Language Processing
    • The attempt to get computers to understand spoken speech.
    • Voice recognition has been a recent breakthrough
      • How Alexa, Siri, and other voice assistants work
        • Each has its own systems
          • FYI, Siri fails--I was taking students to New Orleans for a meeting once and we were in Lafayette, LA. I wanted directions to Mulate's restaurant. Siri could not find it when I said it as "moo-lats" or the correct local pronounciation. But, when I said "moo-la-tees" the directions came right up
    • Lexical analysis is still a problem
      • "It involves identifying and analyzing the structure of words. Lexicon of a language means the collection of words and phrases in a language. Lexical analysis is dividing the whole chunk of text into paragraphs, sentences, and words." From: tutorialspoint.com
  • Chess and other games
    • Games are an old area in AI
    • Checkers and Backgammon are understood
      • Checkers is Solved (Science) Abstract only
      • Checkers-play against a computer (click on link below)
        • Chinook
      • Backgammon
        • Two person game with perfect information
        • TD-Gammon software taught itself and plays at competitive levels with best human players
        • It also found novel moves that humans had never tried, some of those are now used by human players
    • Chess is falling fast (Deep Blue)
      • Video: Deep Blue and Kasparov
        • FYI: In 1997 the CS class watched some parts of these matches in class.
        • AlphaZero teaches itself chess (video)
          • The "zero" means it has no human-inputted knowledge
          • It teaches itself by playing itself
          • Plays Go, Japanese Chess, and Chess
        • Go
          • The game of Go also fell to AI recently: Video
    • 2021 World Chess Championships
      • NBC News article shows that human chess champions now use computer chess programs to practice against and to find new moves.
      • "Carlsen won the latest games in part by departing from the ideal sequence that Nepomniachtchi might have expected from his computerized analysis — a particularly human trick."
    • 2023 World Chess Championships
    • Carlson wins two championships
    • A place to play chess on-line. http://www.chessclub.com/
    • Poker
      • Pluribus
      • Abstract (Science):
        • "In recent years there have been great strides in artificial intelligence (AI), with games often serving as challenge problems, benchmarks, and milestones for progress. Poker has served for decades as such a challenge problem. Past successes in such benchmarks, including poker, have been limited to two-player games. However, poker in particular is traditionally played with more than two players. Multiplayer games present fundamental additional issues beyond those in two-player games, and multiplayer poker is a recognized AI milestone. In this paper we present Pluribus, an AI that we show is stronger than top human professionals in six-player no-limit Texas hold’em poker, the most popular form of poker played by humans."
      • Facebook and CMU program learns to play poker, and win
  • Robotics
    • "Hard AI" said MIT's Rodney Brooks some years ago. It's still true.
    • Difficult because of the constraints of the real world
      • Make robots Rodney Brooks argues that robots should be more like children
        • 2 yr olds: recognize object/class differences
          • e.g., apple, red or green
        • 4 yr olds: have better language understanding than Siri or other similar programs
        • 6 yr olds: have superior manual dexterity than any robot
        • 8 yr olds: possess social understanding and can know what is possible in the real world
          • They know, for instance, that biting the chef's head off at a restaurant because the food was bad is not a permissible response
        • In sum, Brooks is saying we still have a long way to go in robotics
    • Boston Dynamics Robots
      • Dancing robots (scary, busting a move!)
      • Their catalog (bring cash, Spot costs $74,500, shipping included)
    • Types of Robots
      • Pre-programmed: usually perform one repetitive function only
      • Humanoid: imitate some human skills or behavior
      • Autonomous: work on their own-driverless vehicles, vacuum cleaners
      • Teleoperated: work under human control
      • Augmenting: enhance human capabilities (move heavy objects)
    • Robot Fail (from Robocop movie)
      • Don't point a gun at robot Ed-209!
    • Drones
      • World Record Drones
        • This scares me
      • In warfare
        • Armed drones (UAVs) are now a feature of modern war
          
• Expert Systems
  • Another success of AI
  • Consist of inference engine and knowledge base
    • Inference Engine: uses if--then rules
      • If your stomach hurts, then X could be the cause
    • Knowledge Base
      • The particular information of a subject
      • Usually drawn by interviewing human experts and then coding that into a form that inference engine can query
        • Stomach pain comes from: food poisoning, pregnancy, amoebic infection...
  • Critics (Dreyfus) claim that such expert knowledge is shallower than that of human experts
  • Many expert systems have been developed
  • Examples: examples below come from this link
    • MYCIN: This was one of the earliest expert systems that was based on backward chaining. It has the ability to identify various bacteria that cause severe infections. It is also capable of recommending drugs based on a person’s weight.
    • DENDRAL: This was an AI based expert system used essentially for chemical analysis. It uses a substance’s spectrographic data in order to predict its molecular structure.
    • R1/XCON: This ES had the ability to select specific software to generate a computer system as per user preference.
    • PXDES: This system could easily determine the type and the degree of lung cancer in patients based on limited data.
    • CaDet: This is a clinical support system that identifies cancer in early stages.
    • DXplain: This is also a clinical support system that is capable of suggesting a variety of diseases based on just the findings of the doctor.
• Knowledge Retrieval and Data Mining (Video from Carnegie Mellon course)
  • Newer area, notice how Data Mining and Machine Learning go together
  • Consists of finding difficult to see patterns in large groups of data (i.e., stock market)
• Machine Learning
  • How can machines be made to learn for themselves (i.e., like children do)?
  • Machine learning learns by examining a large dataset and then making predictions
    • Often, the designers are unaware of how the program is "learning"
      
  • How Amazon recommends items to you (video)
    • Collaborative filtering worked well
    • Newer, state of the art models did not
    • Finally, a simple model based on preference of historical items outpredicted collaborative filtering
  • Below is part of a recent e-mail to me from Amazon
    • I had been looking for a 2" receiver hitch to fit my 2003 Ford F-150 truck
    • I had even returned one because it did not fit in the space needed



Here is the receiver hitch I bought, installed (I have since painted the bumper, so it looks much nicer :-)



• Agents
• Consist of software that can search a database
• Many use the Internet as their domain
• Another newer area
• Knowledge Representation
  • How is knowledge represented?
  • How do humans represent knowledge?
  • How should computers represent knowledge?
  • Types
    • Logical representation
      • Basis for computer coding
    • Semantic networks (video)
      • Graphical representation using nodes and connections
    • Frames
      • Containers for knowledge
      • Think of "classroom" as a frame
        • Fill in this sentence: The student went to the front of the class to ________ .
          • Unlikely that you said "to feed the elephant" most classrooms do not contain pachyderms but they do contain whiteboards, desks, students, bulletin boards...
    • Production rules
      • Used in expert systems
      • Condition->Action rules
        • Example: If today is Friday night you need not set the alarm clock
• Parallel Distributed Processing (video)
  • Notice how several registers at the grocery store speed up the check out process
• Alternative to von Neumann serial design
• Difficult to implement the software
  • FYI: I always liked the example of preparing a meal
  • You have to plan ahead and manage the various parts so as to have it all come together at one time
    • So, if menu is salad, baked potatoes, steak, and green beans
    • You should start the potatoes in the oven first, make the salad while the potatoes are baking, grill the steak, and nuke the frozen green beans last
• Machine Vision
  • Another difficult area
  • Human brain spends more time processing vision than anything else
  • Original Westworld movie trailer
    • Westworld robots "vision" (video)
    • The robot (Yul Brynner's character) detects heat and lo-res vision. It cannot discriminate between the flame and his prey
  • Predator movie scene (video)
    • Predator can only detect heat signature, cannot see Arnold when he's the same temperature as his surroundings
  • Modern machine vision (video)
  • Problem is how to analyze and interpret the large amount of data that is collected
  • Facial Recognition
    • Video
      • FYI: my iPhone's facial recognition of me has quit working, I have to type in my code
      • Portland, Oregon has banned facial recognition
    • Facial recognition targets African Americans mistakenly
• Communication
  • Protocols
  • The issue here is how to ensure that any type of computer or othere device can work with the internet. Protocols allow a wide variety of devices to interoperate.
    • Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) – used for data transmission
    • User Datagram Protocol (UDP) – used by programs to send short datagram messages
    • Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) – messages used for diagnostic or error-generating purposes
    • Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) – application protocol that uses hyperlinks between nodes containing text
    • Post Office Protocol (POP) – used by local email clients to retrieve email from a remote server over TCP IP
    • File Transfer Protocol (FTP) – protocol to transfer computer files from a server to a client and vice versa
    • Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) – a communication protocol used by email clients to retrieve messages from a mail server over TCP IP
• Human Computer Interaction (HCI) (Video)
  • Usability/User experience UX
    • This is a big topic, one that we'll visit later in the course
    • It also touches closely our 2023 theme of user friendliness
    • Web pages are one component of usability but it really applies to nearly any human interface
      • FYI: Would you like to borrow my truck?
        • Can you handle a 5-speed manual transmission and a clutch? My truck is less usable than one equipped with an automatic transmission. Oh, try to buy a new vehicle with a manual transmission:
          • 2021 vehicles with manual transmissions
          • 2022 vehicles with manual transmissions
          • 2024 vehicles with manual transmissions
          • 2024 SUVs with manual transmissions
  • Desktop metaphor, GUI, and Mouse
    • Today's typical computer graphical user interface: Xerox Parc started it, Apple modified it, Microsoft implemented Windows
      • FYI: in this class many years ago the pre-Windows PC users in the class wanted me to use a PC. I did so but kept reaching for the non-existent mouse!
  • Social media
    • Facebook and other apps
  • Videoconferencing
    • Zoom has taken off thanks to the pandemic
  • Ubiquitous computing
    • Computers everywhere
      • Think of your smartphone, your smartwatch
        • Soon your smart refrigerator (hey, that milk is out of date!), and other appliances

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