Version of 8 April 2007

Overview of the assignments in this course

There are five written assignments detailed below, totaling 20% of your course grade. 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

If an individual hands in work actually done by anyone else (a classmate, or anyone else), that violates the regulations of this University. I can often detect such violations and I will investigate them. If I have strong suspicions of such behavior, I am required to report it to the College and the University.

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 csu520sp07 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. 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., "YangCSU520sp07FirstProject.zip".

Assignment #1: Search - AIMA Exercises - Due Tuesday, Feb. 6th 11:59pm

• 1.11 (see pg. 18 for Samuels' checkers work)
• 2.5
• 3.7
• 3.8
• 3.15 a and b, informal discussion of c, skip d
• 4.5
• 5.1
• 5.2
• Extra credit: 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 Tuesday, Feb. 20th, 11:59pm

• 7.2 You can use a tabular form to list the 32 possible worlds, instead of drawing them.
• 7.5 Hint: Remember that C and D are always involved, whether or not they appear explicitly.
• 7.6 You should find the standard nand and nor among them.
• 7.7 Prove only the first seven of the equivalences. 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.
• 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 Hint: The domain needn't be restricted to just a and b.
• 8.6 a through f only.
• 8.11, omitting the last part about the mth cousin n times removed.
• 9.4
• 9.18
• Extra Credit: 10.7
• 10.12

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

AIMA Exercises - Due Thursday, March 22nd, 11:59pm.

• 13.1 - Keep in mind that conjunction is commutative and associative.
• 13.3 Extra Credit. Not really that hard. There are only four atomic events for the two random variables, A and B.
• 13.5 - Note axiom 3 on page 471.
• 13.6 Pay attention to where bold P notation is introduced in the chapter and how they explain what it means. Ditto upper and lower case random variable names.
• 13.9 - Cf. the bold notation, bottom of pg. 470. Converting conditionals to ratios of prior (unconditional) probabilities makes the proof straightforward.
• 13.10 Just crank through the algebra for a few steps and you'll arrive at the answer.
• 14.1 - a through d, but not e.
• 14.2 - a through d
• 14.11 - Extra Credit. Not trivial. Here are some hints:
  One of the four sampling distributions is:
  P(C|¬r,s) = αP(C)P(s|C)P(¬r|C) = ... = <1/21,20/21>
  and entries on the diagonal are, e.g.,
  q((c,r) → (c,r)) = 0.5P(c|r,s) + 0.5P(r|c,s,w) = 17/27
  whereas other have a single variable sampled at weight 0.5, and double changes don't occur (value 0).

Assignment #4: Learning

AIMA Exercises - Due Tuesday, April 17th, 11:59pm.

• 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. Then do the same comparison using the Gini index as described in
  these lecture slides by Zupan and Bratko.
• Extra credit: 18.8 - (references Fig. 18.5)

Assignment #5: Natural language CANCELLED

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