Version of 7 March 2006

Overview of the assignments in this course

There are two classes of assignments. One is comprised of the five assignments detailed below, totaling 10% of your course grade. The other is the Semester Project Your project will have three due dates for the initial plan, interim report, and final report, totaling 25% of your course credit. Details are 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. If an individual hands in work actually done by another, that violates the regulations of this University. I can often detect such violations, investigate them; the consequences can be serious.

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 the programming portions of your assignments, and your project work in particular, are best sent via email. All email to me regarding the course must have a Subject line beginning with csu520sp06 or I will ask you to resend it properly.

Many of the exercises in PAIP have answers included. Whenever such exercises are assigned, you must add value, that is, you should comment the code, comment the results, try various inputs and variations, and use step, trace, and Norvig's debug and undebug as appropriate. Sometimes the compile code will be so efficiently structured that tracing and stepping show you little. In that case paste in the definition again, to be sure your function is not compiled.

Some assignments may be handed in by simply pasting your text into email. If you attach a file to your email, you may only attach a single file. Therefore, if your work consists of more than a single file (which it normally should), they should be converted to a single zip, tar, or jar file. This would include all code, input, results, Readme (required!), etc. In addition, the body of your email should briefly describe, in a sentence or two, what is being attached in such a case. If your input or output has extraneous material in it when produced, feel free to edit it down, leaving only its important content. You must not give your file a generic name such as "Assignment3". Instead, a combination of your name, class, and assignment name should be used, e.g., "YangCSU520sp06Proj2". All code should be commented and include your name, date, course, etc.

The five assignments (+ 1)

The topics of the assignments correspond with the five major topics covered in the course. In the programming portions of the assignments, you will be asked to draw on the two Lisp codebases set up by Norvig and Russell, one for PAIP and the other for AIMA. Portions of some of the assignments will be exercises to work out on paper; other portions will involve your writing code or doing careful and documented runs of code from the PAIP or AIMA collections. The preferred, and most powerful, is our Solaris Lisp system.

Assignment 0 - Lisp startup and mailing list signup

Assignment #0. Study the Lisp page for the course. If you're new to Lisp, dive into Chapters 1 and 3 of PAIP. Install a Lisp system on your favorite machine or use the Solaris Lisp system. Try it out, with PAIP to guide you. Read about how to download the PAIP software and then get it running in the Lisp system(s) you've chosen.

Sign up right away for the mailing list. You also need to attend to the follow-up mail the system will send you after you sign up. Please include your name in the sign up process. I will immediately begin using the list to alert you about updates and changes to the syllabus, readings, assignments, Lisp use, etc. You will not hear about these things in a timely manner unless you're signed up.

Assignment for course part 1 - Search and Agents

Assignment #1, due emailed by 11:59pm, January 26th. Hardcopy portions due in class Jan 30th.

PAIP: Chapter 1: Do Exercises 3 and 5. Use both step and trace for #3. (Enter :help in ACL to see useful commands such as :his, :step, and :res - also, see the Allegro CL 6.1 Documentation linked on the course Lisp page, especially this section on debugging.)
Chapter 6: Do Exercises 6, 8, and 10, also using step and trace.
Chapter 6: Run two examples in Sec. 6.4, trip, and search-gps using (debug :search) and later, (undebug). (Will give the extra output shown in PAIP.) Discuss the operation of the searches and why they give the various outputs they do.
Written assignment on Agents, in AIMA: Do Exercises 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3.
Extra Credit: Do one of the vacuum world implementation exercises, Exercise 2.7 or a later one.

Assignment for course part 2 - AIMA III Knowledge & Reasoning

DUE DATE: Wednesday, March 22nd. Directions: Hand in as much of your work on this Assignment #2 as you can electronically, by 11:59pm the 22nd. Some portions of the assignment may be easier to write out on paper. Such hardcopy portions are due in class on the afternoon of the 22nd. Be sure to cross-reference your handins - mention the files in your hardcopy and the hardcopy in your README in your files, zipped as usual if more than a single file.

Assignment #2. The first posting, 2/21, contained exercises from Chapter 7. The remainder, exercises from Chapters 8, 9, and 10, were listed in this class email on 2/27 and are detailed below.

• Exercise 7.2 You should understand that the only rooms in the possible worlds that you need to be concerned with are the three that are adjacent to the visited ones, rooms 1,3; 2,2; and 3,1. For each of these you need only consider whether a Wumpus is present or not, or whether a pit is present or not. When you write out all possible worlds in this manner, you can write for convenience, only the true propositions, and assume the rest are false. Also remember that the KB is true only in those worlds for which the agent has reasoned that the KB is true.
  
  
• Exercise 7.4 What is needed here are a few English sentences for prrofs of each of 7a through 7e.
  
  
• Exercise 7.7. These can be directly verified using truth tables or by reducing them using other already proven equivalences.
  
  
• Exercise 7.8 This is not a difficult set of exercises. Study each one to see if it makes sense to you. The unusual nature of logical implication can sometimes lead you astray. Using equivalences, especially getting rid of implication, ⇒, can help. In some cases you will be able to reduce a pair of expressions to the identical form, proving that they are equivalent. In other cases you can reduce them to tautologies, proving they're valid, e.g., T ∨ A. For this exercise, and for 7.9 you are welcome to use the validity function from the AIMA logic/prop.lisp code in addition to proving the statements manually, which you should do also. See the AIMA Lisp note for Exercise 8.11 below.
  
  
• Exercise 7.9 Same approach as 7.8.
  
  
• Exercise 8.6
  
  
• Exercise 8.11 - Extra Credit Requires running AIMA tell and ask. Do the standard load of aima.lisp as described here and then run (test 'logic) to load and run the logic examples. (No need to do (test 'all)). The results will show you how to use tell and ask.
  
  
• Exercise 9.3 Experiment with it or use Fig. 9.1
  
  
• Exercise 9.4
  
  
• Exercise 9.9
  
  
• Exercise 9.18
  
  
• Exercise 10.1
  
  

Assignment for course part 3, AIMA V - Uncertain Knowledge & Reasoning

DUE DATE: Wednesday, March 29th. Directions: Hand in as much of your work on this Assignment #3 as you can electronically, by 11:59pm the 29th. Some portions of the assignment may be easier to write out on paper. Such hardcopy portions are due in class on the afternoon of the 29th. Be sure to cross-reference your handins - mention the files in your hardcopy and the hardcopy in your README in your files, zipped as usual if more than a single file.

• Exercise 13.1
  
  
• Exercise 13.3
  
  
• Exercise 13.5 If you're not familiar with poker hands or the combinatorics involved, you can find all you need in a flash on the web, such as this page from Mathworld and and this one on poker hands.
  
  
• Exercise 13.6 Pay attention to capitalized and lower-case conventions and their different meanings.
  
  
• Exercise 13.8 Study normalization, pages 476 and others.
  
  
• Exercise 13.12 Use Bayes and normalization.
  
  
• Exercise 14.1
  
  
• Exercise 14.2
  
  
• Exercise 15.2 - Optional, Extra Credit
  
  
• Exercise 16.2
  
  
• Exercise 16.3 - Optional, Extra Credit Fairly mathematical.
  
  

Assignment for course part 4 - Learning

Assignment #4, due date to be set (In preparation).

Assignment for course part 5 and most of the material in part 5 itself, has been cancelled.

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