CPE/CSC 480
Artificial Intelligence
Fall 2009
CPE/CSC 480-F09 Artificial Intelligence Syllabus
General Information
- Course Description:
[from the Cal Poly 2007-9 Catalog]
"Programs and techniques that characterize artificial intelligence.
Programming in a high level language. 3 lectures, 1 laboratory. "
Prerequisites:
CSC 103 (Fundamentals of Computer Science III), with a grade of C- or better.
Students should be familiar with programming in Java,
and be able to work with elementary statements in propositional
and predicate logic.
- Goals and Objectives
The goal of this course is to understand important problems, challenges,
concepts and techniques from the field of Artificial Intelligence.
In order to achieve this, students learn how to analyse, design, and
program intelligent agents of varying complexities. These agents gather information
from their environment, convert it into a suitable internal representation
(which may be augmented with information provided by the designer or other sources),
analyse their internal knowledge to determine suitable actions,
and finally execute some actions.
More specifically, after successfull completion of the course, students should
- know classical examples of artificial intelligence
- be able to identify critical aspects of intelligence in humans and in computer-based systems
- know characteristics of programs and systems that can be considered "intelligent"
- be familiar with the main problem solving methods used in AI programs
- understand the use of heuristics in search problems and games
- know a variety of ways to represent, process and retrieve knowledge and information
- know the fundamentals of artificial intelligence programming techniques
in a modern programming language
- consider ideas and issues associated with social technical,
and ethical uses of systems that involve artificial intelligence
The following textbook will be used in this course:
-
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Second Edition)
by Stuart Russell
and Peter Norvig;
Prentice Hall, 2003. ISBN 0-13-103805-2.
The El Corral bookstore has the second edition together with a sample chapter of the third edition (which is scheduled to come out this fall, but not in time for the course).
You can also check http://isbn.nu/http://isbn.nu/9780131038059
for prices of new and used copies at online bookstores
like Amazon, Abebooks.com, Half.com and a few others.
While it is better to have the newest edition of the textbook, much of the material
covered in this class is also well presented in the older editions.
There are also international editions available; I assume that the contents will be the same, but I have not checked this.
There is a column in the course schedule
indicating the chapters in the book that correspond to a topic discussed in class.
Students are expected to read the respective chapters before the topic is covered in class.
For further reading, here are some more suggestions:
- A comparison of
AI text books by Stuart Russell
and Peter Norvig.
- The lecture notes from
MIT's course on Artificial Intelligence
are available through their OpenCourseWare project.
The topics covered are similar to ours, and some of the notes
contain nice examples.
- Another AI textbook with an agent-based perspective is
Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis
by Nils J. Nilsson,
Morgan Kaufmann,
1998, ISBN 1-55860-467-7.
- The fourth edition of "Artificial Intelligence - Structures and
Strategies for Problem Solving"
by George F. Luger ,
Addison Wesley, 2008, ISBN 9780321545893
is based on a more traditional approach to AI, with less emphasis
on intelligent agents.
- A more philosophically oriented treatment of the major AI topics
is
Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence --
A Methodological and Computational Analysis
by Achim Hoffmann,
Springer-Verlag, August 1998, ISBN 981-3083-97-2.
There are also a few books on more practical aspects of AI programming and intelligent agents:
- Programming Collective Intelligence
Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications.
Toby Segaran, August 2007, ISBN 10: 0-596-52932-5 ISBN 13: 9780596529321
O'Reilly
400 pages, $39.99 US.
-
This book is focused on Web applications like recommendation engines, and gives Python code samples for the underlying methods.
- AI for Game Developers.
David M. Bourg, Glenn Seeman,
O'Reilly
July 2004, ISBN 0-596-00555-5, 400 pages, $39.95 US.
The complete set of examples from this book is available at
http://examples.oreilly.com/ai/.
- AI Game Programming Wisdom
Edited by Steve Rabin.
Charles River Media,
ISBN 1-58450-077-8, Price $69.95, March 2002.
- AI Game Programming Wisdom Vol. 2
Edited by Steve Rabin.
Charles River Media,
ISBN 1-58450-289-4, $69.95, December 2003, Book/CD (Win/Linux) 732 pages.
-
AI Game Development: Synthetic Creatures with Learning and Reactive Behaviors.
Alex Champandard,
New Riders, ISBN 1592730043; $49.99, Nov 2003.
Lecture Notes
The PowerPoint slides used in class will be available to students through this Web page (e.g. via the course schedule).
Additional Material
Further material will be made available through handouts in class, and through pointers to relevant Web pages.
Grading Policy
The table shown gives an overview of the calculation of the grades.
I reserve the right to change the formula used.
Please note that the project consists of several parts which will be evaluated separately.
The project will be done in teams, and the performance of the team as a whole
will be graded unless there is a clear disparity in the contribution
of the individual team members.
Should this be the case, I might ask for additional documentation like work sheets,
email messages, or draft copies of documentation to evaluate individual contributions.
Student scores will be made available via Blackboard. If you notice any discrepancies
between an entry on Blackboard and the score indicated on the returned work,
please let me know.
Academic Dishonesty and Cheating
You are expected to adhere to Cal Poly's Code of Student Conduct, Rights and Responsibilities.
Academic dishonesty can be a serious offense.
Any instances of cheating or plagiarism may be reported to the department chair
and the Office of Student Rights & Responsibilities (OSRR).
The Cal Poly rules and policies are listed in the Cal Poly catalog as well as at the OSRR web site,
http://www.calpoly.edu/~osrr/index.html.
If the rules are unclear or you are unsure of how they apply, ask the instructor beforehand.
We may use programs or services like Moss to compare assignments
within a section, across all current sections of this class, and with old assignments.
While such programs are not perfect, they detect suspicious similarities
even after replacement of variable names and other identifiers.
Turning in work is presumed to be a claim of authorship unless
explicitly stated otherwise.