CSG120 Artificial Intelligence - Spring 2005 - Weekly Reports

Professor Futrelle - College of Computer and Information Sciences, Northeastern U., Boston, MA

Version of 4 January 2005


Weekly reports - What, Why, How, When

What

You are required to write and hand in a report each week. More than one quarter of your course grade, 26%, will be based on your weekly reports. Unless otherwise directed, you should be writing about what you read in your two textbooks. You should hand in between 250 and 500 words of writing each week -- if you pace yourself, over seven days, that's only about three to five sentences per day. When you write about your reading, your reports should attempt to cover what will be discussed in the upcoming lecture -- read ahead. You might also want to comment on the readings for the previous lecture, to the extent that that lecture helped to clarify the earlier material (or not!).

Your programming assignments will require some accompanying documentation. This will be in addition to your weekly reports.

Why

AI is not a mathematical/logical field in which you can simply learn some algorithms. It is a rich and complex field, rich with ideas, that ranges from computers to psychology and philosophy. For that reason, there's a lot of reading required. Since it's easy to let this slide because it seems general and is "not on the tests", I'm requiring that you write about your reading every week.

How

Your writing can be in plain text, emailed to me, or can be via a web page or blog that I can access at a fixed URL or a new one for each week. You are more than welcome to include figures, typically as jpegs in your web pages. I will grade both the content and form of your writing. Please try to write clear and correctly formed English, and spellcheck it.

When

Your reports are due by the end of each Tuesday, 11:59pm, to give me time to read and grade them and hand them back in the Thursday class. Each is noted on the course schedule.


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