CSCI 324 Artificial Intelligence Syllabus Fall 2013

Classroom location: HIRC 7

Class schedule: MWF 1:00-1:50pm

Prerequisites: CSCI 203 C or better

Instructor: Dr. Don Allison

Office: 12A Lee Hall/44 Bacon Hall

Phone: 436-3439

Email: allisodl@oneonta.edu

Office Hours: MWF 2-3pm, MWF 4-5pm

Others by appointment (or just drop by)

Catalog Description:

A survey of important areas of artificial intelligence: expert systems, natural language processing, and artificial neural networks. Common algorithms will be covered as needed. Projects will be assigned corresponding to the three areas surveyed.

Course Description (the inside scoop):

Since the field of AI is too deep and broad to completely cover in a semester, this course is a survey of the field, looking at the historical development of AI, and techniques that have been developed along the way. Topics such as knowledge representation, search, computer vision, machine learning, language understanding, etc, will be examined from an AI perspective, and attempts to build an intelligent machine will be examined to see why they have failed, and to find what lessons we can learn from these failures.

Course Goals:

To understand how AI problems can be formulated as search problems, to learn some of the major algorithms and techniques developed while trying to build intelligent machines, and to begin to understand why the problem is such a challenge.

Text and Software:

The text for the course is Artificial Intelligence Illuminated, by Ben Coppin, published by Jones & Bartlett Learning, ISBN 978-0763732301. Programs can be written in Visual C++, which is available in campus labs and for download from Microsoft, or in Common Lisp, which is available in the department lab or free on line.

Tentative Schedule: (order of readings & other assignments, by due dates, course activities, course content by expected order of coverage, test dates and test coverage)

DATE	MONDAY	TUESDAY	WEDNESDAY	THURSDAY	FRIDAY
Aug 26-Aug 30		Last day to register without late fee	Classes begin		Read Chapters 1&2, History
Sep 2-Sep 6	Labor Day Classes meet	Add-drop ends		ROSH HASHANA	Read Chapter 3, Knowledge Representation UG diploma fee due
Sep 9-Sep 13	Program 1 is due	Last day to add a full semester course	PATRIOT DAY		Read Chapter 4, Search
Sep 16-Sep 20		CONSTITUTION DAY		First day of Sukkot	Read Chapter 5, More Search National POW/MIA Recognition day
Sep 23-Sep 27			TAP certification begins Last day of Sukkot		Read Chapter 6, Game Playing
Sep 30-Oct 4		Grad diploma fee due END OF FIRST MINI	START OF SECOND MINI		Read Chapter 7, Logic Feast of St. Francis of Assisi
Oct 7-Oct 11	Child Health day		EXAM #1 Leif Erikson day		Read Chapter 8, Inference
Oct 14-Oct 18	Columbus Day Classes meet	College closes after last evening class Eid-al-Adha White Cane Safety Day	BREAK Boss’s day	BREAK	BREAK
Oct 21-Oct25	Classes resume Interim Progress Reports due		END OF FIRST HALF COURSES INTD 133 ends		Read Chapter 9, Expert Systems
Oct 28-Nov 1	Program 2 is due		Last day to drop a full semester course	Halloween	Read Chapter 10, Machine Learning All Saint’s day
Nov 4-Nov 8	DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME ENDED YESTERDAY… did you set your clock back???	Muharram/Islamic New Year			Read Chapter 11, Neural Networks END OF SECOND MINI
Nov 11-Nov 15	Veterans’ Day Classes meet Begin Spring preenrollment START OF THIRD MINI				Read Chapter 13, Artificial Life Last day to make up incompletes
Nov 18-Nov 22			EXAM #2		Read Chapter 14, Genetic Algorithms College closes after last evening class Program 3 is due
Nov 25-Nov 29	BREAK	BREAK	BREAK	BREAK First day of Hanukkah Thanksgiving day	BREAK Black Friday
Dec 2-Dec 6	Classes resume Last day to take a leave of absence Cyber Monday			Last day of Hanukkah	Read Chapters 15, 16 Planning Last day to turn in grades for incompletes
Dec 9-Dec 13					Read Chapter 19, Intelligent Agents Last day of class
Dec 16-Dec 20	F E 10MWF 8-10:30am CSCI 116 12MWF 11am-1:30pm CSCI 243 1MWF 2-4:30pm CSCI 324	I X 10TTh 8-10:30am 2:30TTh 11am-1:30pm 11:30TTh 2-4:30pm Wright Brothers day	N A 9MWF 8-10:30am CSCI 100 11MWF 11am-1:30pm CSCI 216 4MW 2-4:30pm	A M 8:30TTh 8-10:30am 1TTh 11am-1:30pm 4TTh 2-4:30pm	L S 8MWF 8-10:30am 2MWF 11am-1:30pm 3MWF 2-4:30pm

General Policy Information:

All college policies will be adhered to, including policies on attendance, academic honesty, etc. Students are expected to be familiar with and adhere to these policies as outlined in the student handbook, this syllabus, and other administration publications.

Attendance Policy:

Attendance is STRONGLY encouraged. Although it will not enter into your grade computation directly, I will be taking attendance occasionally, especially at the beginning of the semester to start putting names with faces. However, students who attend class regularly do much better in their classes than their peers who attend sporadically. You will be responsible for material covered in class as well as the material in the text. In addition, we will be discussing the exams and programming projects in class, writing sample code for them, and so on, as well as answering questions about the assigned material, so it is in your best interest to attend class as much as possible. Finally, the college has a requirement that students attend one of the first two lectures and the first lab for any course or they can be administratively dropped from the course and their space given to someone else. Additionally, anyone missing 25% or more of the class meetings to that point at any time up through midterm can be involuntarily dropped from the course. Depending on the number of people on the waiting list for this course, these policies will be enforced more or less stringently.

Collaboration Policy:

Cheating or other academic dishonesty hurts others as well as yourself and will not be tolerated! For this course, however, it IS acceptable to collaborate with your classmates, under certain conditions. All work submitted on the exams should be yours and yours alone, as should any code you submit. If you are working on a project and run into a problem, it is acceptable to ask a classmate or other person a general question (such as, “what are the two conditions needed to guarantee termination of a recursion”), AS LONG AS you actually do the work yourself. For instance, it is unacceptable to ask someone (other than your instructor) to write code for you to handle argument passing for a function, or code for opening a file for input. You can share code that was discussed in class however. In other words, discussing algorithms or the lecture content is okay, but discussing specifics of the programming assignments is not. You should be the physical creator of everything you turn in that wasn’t provided by the instructor. You should also be able to answer any question I have about how every one of your programs works.

Programming Style Guidelines:

Programming style is an important part of coding, and programs you write for this class will be expected to follow the style guidelines discussed in class and illustrated by the programs we write in class. You should indent your code to reflect its internal structure. You should use block comments to explain what your code is doing at a high level. Each function should have a header that gives the function name, the inputs, the output(s), and lists any side effects, as well as providing a two or three sentence summary of what the function does. In addition, your main program file should have a block header similar to the following:

// CSCI 324 Artificial Intelligence Fall 2013

// Program #1: Getting started

// Author: Don Allison

// Date Due: 9 September 2013

//

// This program plays tic-tac-toe

//

Your header should include the course name and number, the assignment number, your name, the program due date, and a two or three sentence description of the purpose and function of the program.

Program Turn-in Procedure:

You should run your program, capture the output, and append it to the bottom of your source file that contains the main function, as comments. You should zip up all your .h and .cpp files and email me the zipped file with a subject line, “CSCI 324 Project X” where X is either 1, 2, 3, or 4. These should be emailed to me by midnight on the day they are due. Make sure you turn in all the required parts!!!

Grading and Other Administrivia:

Exams:

There will be two exams and a final. The final will be comprehensive. The three exams will be worth 15%, 20%, and 25% respectively.

Programming Projects:

The programming projects are an integral part of the course. There will be roughly four programming projects throughout the semester.

Grade Computation:

	Weight	Tentative Date
Exam 1	15%	9 October
Exam 2	20%	20 November
Final Exam	25%	16 December, 2pm
Programming Projects	40%
Total	100%

Make-up Test and Late Assignment Policy:

Assignments are considered due by class time on their due date, and any turned in after that time will be considered late. If an assignment is late, 10% will be deducted for each weekday it is late, up to a maximum of 100%. So, for instance, if the assignment is due on Friday and you turn it in on Monday, 10% will be deducted as a late penalty (weekends don’t count so it is one day late). Any assignment more than two weeks late will not be accepted. All assignments must be turned in by the last day of classes for them to count toward the course grade. You should plan to be present for all the tests and the final exam. Any makeups will be allowed only for legitimate, school-approved excuses, and should be arranged with the instructor as soon as possible after you discover you can’t attend the exam (before the exam is given whenever possible). In any case, all work must be completed by the last class, including any makeup exams. Exams missed for unexcused absences, or exams not made up by the last day of classes will be recorded as a zero grade.

Additional Resources:

Here are some books currently in our library:

Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents, David Poole, 2010, Q342 .P66 2010

Artificial Intelligence for Games, Ian Millington, 2009, QA76.76 C672 M549 2009

Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine, J. Storrs Hall, 2007, Q335 .H348 2007

Artificial Intelligence: A Beginner’s Guide, Blay Whitby, 2003, Q335 .W45 1988

Creating Personalities for Synthetic Actors: Towards Autonomous Personality Agents, Robert Trappl, 1997, TR897.7 .C7 1997

Artificial Live: An Overview, Christopher Langton, 1995, QH324.2 .A74 1995

The Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: A Sourcebook, D. Partridge, 1990, Q335 .F68 1990

Problem-Solving and Artificial Intelligence, Jean Lauriere, 1990, Q335 .L3813 1990

Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory, Roger Schank, 1990, BF431 .S277 1990

Artificial Intelligence, Patrick Winston, 1984, Q335 .W56 1984

Artificial Intelligence Programming, Eugene Charniak, 1980, Q336 .C48 1980

Additional Unique Aspects of the Course:

This course is very hands on. Students learn AI algorithms by implementing them, and the course grading system reflects this emphasis.

Emergency Evacuation:

The Evacuation Assembly Area for this course is in the quad, 50 feet from the building. In case a prolonged building evacuation is required, you will be directed to the building Evacuation Site. The Evacuation Site for this class is the Fine Arts Theater in the Fine Arts Center. In any case, if a building evacuation occurs, stay together as a class so that we can determine that everyone has made it safely from the building. Evacuation is to occur any time the fire alarm sounds, an evacuation announcement is made, or a university official orders you to evacuate the building. After the building has been evacuated, it is not to be re-entered until University Police gives permission.