CSCI 4150: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Fall 2001

Announcements

• [12/16] The final has been graded. Class average is 201.7 with standard deviation of 55.5. Median grade was 208.5, maximum was 289, minimum was 60 (out of a possible 370). We were pretty strict in the grading. I'll be sending out final grade reports within the next few days.

• [12/15] I've posted the results of the connect four tournament for A4P5. See the Assignment 4 page for details (also on scoring for A4P5).

• [12/12-13] Prefinal grades have been emailed.

• [12/11] I've scheduled a "Question & Answer format" review session for Wednesday December 11 from 3:00 to 4:30pm in the first floor conference room of Amos Eaton (off the lounge across from my office). If students run out of questions, then we will finish early.

  I will be out of town Thursday and therefore not available for questions after this Wednesday.

• [12/10] We're still working on prefinal grades --- catching up on the grading backlog and making sure our records are accurate. I expect to send them out sometime Tuesday.

• [12/8] My midterm examinations from the past two years are available online:
  • 1999 midterm (postscript, pdf)
  • 2000 midterm (postscript, pdf)

• [12/4] I forgot to announce in class yesterday that I have to cut my office hours a little short today. I'll hold office hours from 1 until 2:30.

Course information

• Teaching staff
• Assignment web pages
• Handouts
• Online course material
• Links
• Course description
• Nuts & bolts (location, time, text)

• Old announcements
• The Scheme page
• Course policies

Teaching staff

Prof. Wes Huang
email: whuang@cs.rpi.edu
Office: Amos Eaton 111
Office hours: Tuesdays 1-3pm, or by appointment

TA: Zie Kone
email: konez@cs.rpi.edu
Office: Lally 003B
Office hours: Wednesdays 12 - 2pm, 4-5pm, or by appointment

Undergraduate TA: Paul Horn
email: hornp@rpi.edu
available for email questions or by appointment

Handouts

• 8/27: Syllabus (postscript, pdf)
• 8/27: Scheme I
• 8/30: Assignment 1 (postscript, pdf)
• 8/30: Scheme II
• 8/30: Top 10 keybindings for Emacs/Edwin for MIT Scheme (postscript, pdf), Emacs quick reference
• 9/6: Scheme III
• 9/6: Assignment 2 (postscript, pdf)
• 9/13: Scheme IV
• 9/17: Assignment 3 (postscript, pdf)
• 9/17: Missionaries and Cannibals implementation in Scheme (postscript, pdf, source)
• 9/20: Slides on BFS, M&C problem, A* (postscript pdf)
• 9/23: Solutions to Assignment 1
• 9/23: Solutions to Assignment 2
• 9/28: Revised slides from 9/27 (postscript, pdf)
• 10/4: Slides from 10/4: minimax (postscript, pdf), first tree (postscript, pdf), second tree (postscript, pdf)
• 10/4: Assignment 4 (postscript, pdf)
• 10/4: Assignment 4, problem 3 worksheet (postscript, pdf)
• 10/4: Solutions to Assignment 3, problem 1
• 10/9: Slides from 10/9 (postscript, pdf)
• 10/25: Assignment 5 (postscript, pdf)
• 10/25: Slides from 10/25 and previous classes (postscript, pdf)
• 11/5: Assignment 6 (postscript, pdf)
• 11/8: Decision tree example (text, postscript, pdf)
• 11/26: Assignment 7 (postscript, pdf)
• 12/6: Final exam information and topics (postscript, pdf)

• Searching "animations" --- these are postscript/pdf files that you can view in ghostscript or acroread to see the progression of these searches. (You could also print them if you really wanted to, but it's more fun to flip through them on your screen.)
  • A* search (postscript, pdf)
  • Greedy search (postscript, pdf)
  • Uniform cost search (postscript, pdf)

• Assignment 1 page
• Assignment 2 page
• Assignment 3 page
• Assignment 4 page
• Assignment 6 page
• Assignment 7 page

• A student showed me the A* Explorer program (available for Windows only) which lets you interactively play around with an A* implementation.

• The Loebner Prize home page The 2001 contest was held on October 13; the results haven't yet been posted (as of 10/15).

Course description

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of Artificial Intelligence. We will be studying techniques for solving problems and making intelligent decisions. The first half of the course will focus on the foundations of Artificial Intelligence: search and logic. The second half of the course will focus on machine learning techniques, including decision trees, reinforcement learning, and neural networks. Knowledge representation and probability will be addressed in conjunction with several topics during the semester.

Students will implement many of the algorithms we cover in programming assignments. The implementation language for these assignments will be Scheme (a dialect of LISP) which will be taught in the first two weeks of the course.

Prerequisite: CSCI 2300 Data Structures and Algorithms. Knowledge of Scheme or LISP is not a prerequisite.

Nuts & bolts

• Time: Mondays and Thursdays, 10:00 - 11:50am
• Location: Sage 3303
• Required text: Nilsson, "Artificial Intelligence: a new synthesis" Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1998.