Version of 16 March 2008

Overview of the assignments in this course

There are four written assignments detailed below. Details of your semester project are available on the Project page.

The difficult problems of working in teams

In practice, in business and industry, working in teams makes a lot of sense. In teaching, it can be a troubling issue. The problem is that I have to give every student a separate grade. Therefore: Any pair of students that wants to work together, primarily on your Project, will be required to give me a solid plan for their work that makes it possible for me to be sure that each person is pulling their weight and gaining the skills and knowledge needed. Note that as soon as two students work as a team, they must produce twice the work, in amount and/or quality, that I expect from a single individual. Unfortunately, that has too often not been the case, and resulted in reduced grades, and that made no one happy. So be warned.

Plagiarism

The mechanics of your assignments

If you need to hand in work that requires working things out on paper, e.g., using logic notation, drawing trees, etc., you may hand it in as hardcopy. But I strongly prefer documents sent as email attachments or as text pasted into your email. All email to me regarding any aspect of the course must have a Subject line beginning with csg120sp08 or I will ask you to resend it properly.

Some assignments may be handed in by simply pasting your text into email. If you attach files to your email, you may only include them as a single file. Therefore, if your work consists of more than a single file (especially true for your projects) they should be converted to a single zip, tar, or jar file. In addition, the body of your email should briefly describe, in a sentence or two, what is being attached in such a case.

From the Dates and Deadlines page: If there are diagrams or notation in your assignment, project, or exam that you cannot conveniently email, get them to me in rm 450 or 460 or the College office, room 202 West Village H, by 4pm on the due date. Or fax to me at 617-373-5121 by that time as well as sending me an email telling me you've faxed some material.

You must not give your file a generic name such as "Project". Instead, a combination of your name, class, and assignment name should be used, e.g., "YangCSG120sp08FirstProject.zip".

Assignment #1: Search - AIMA Exercises - Due Monday February 4th, 9pm

• 1.11 (see pg. 18 for Samuels' checkers work)
• 2.4
• 2.5
• 3.7
• 3.8
• 3.15 a, b. c, skip d
• 4.1 (lengthy answer)
• 4.5
• 5.1
• 5.2
• 5.6
• Extra credit: 5.13
• Extra credit: 6.1
• Extra credit: Exercise 6.10 in Norvig's book: Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming - Case Studies in Common Lisp which is on reserve. Task is to write versions of graph-search and A*-search using hash tables. Use the programming language of your choice.

Assignment #2: Logic - AIMA Exercises - Due Monday February 25th, 9pm

• 7.2 You can use a tabular form to list the 32 possible worlds, instead of drawing them.
• 7.5
• 7.6 You should find the standard nand and nor among them.
• 7.7 A straightforward way to do this is to simply construct the truth tables that contain both the left- and the right-hand sides of the stated equivalences.
• 7.8 Remember: Implication is not causation.
• 8.1 For part e, include in addition, a brief discussion of representing sentences such as, "There is no elephant in the kitchen."
• 8.2
• 8.6
• 8.7
• 8.11 Hint: For the last part, it is convenient to define the predicate NthCousin(n,c,k).
• 9.4
• 9.9
• 9.18
8

Assignment #3: Uncertainty (primarily, Bayesian networks).

AIMA Exercises - Due Monday, March 31st, 9pm.

• 13.1
• 13.3
• 13.6
• 13.9 - Cf. the bold notation, bottom of pg. 470. Converting conditionals to ratios of prior (unconditional) probabilities makes the proof straightforward.
• 13.10
• 14.1 - a through d, but not e.
• 14.2 - a through d (Extra credit: 14.2e)
• 15.12, 16.11 a-c only.

Assignment #4: Learning

AIMA Exercises - Due: Monday, April 7th, 9pm.

• 18.1
• 18.2
• 18.3 - Also consider the variations that arise if you're crossing the street on foot, or by bicycle. Watch out for jaywalkers and jaywalking!
• 18.4
• 18.5
• 18.7
• 18.RPF.1 Compare and discuss the information gain from using Patrons versus Price as the first attribute at beginning of the decision tree for the Restaurant example. But do this by using the simpler Gini index as described in slides 33-39 of
  
  • these lecture slides by Zupan and Bratko (if your browser supports the html) .
  • or as Power Point slides,
  • or as a PDF.

Go to CSG120 home page. or RPF's Teaching Gateway or homepage