Hearing about artificial intelligence is unavoidable these days if you’re watching the news or staying abreast of the technical sector. We frequently hear about the power of AI-enabled tools, and are shown soundbytes of experts extolling the virtues of their approach.

While these stories inform and entertain, they also create the perception that AI i s extremely difficult and exclusively the realm of experts, which simply isn’t true! These days we do not need to be an AI expert to reap the benefits of the research community. Off-the-shelf open source tools exist which are powerful enough to solve many industrial problems. In this talk we will map business problems to tools and show how to translate a problem domain into the expected input of the tool. Using these tools will help us identify development opportunities that we might have otherwise missed and save time by not re-implementing common solving techniques.

In this talk, we’ll cover: * Three common problems that can be solved with AI * Routing vehicles around a map * Solving sudoku puzzles * Building controllers for autonomous vehicles * Three off-the-shelf tools that can solve these problems * Fastdownward * Minisat * OpenAI Gym * The formalisms that allow us to translate the real world problems into ones these solvers recognize * Heuristic search * Boolean Algebra * Markov Decision Processes