Description of the course

Artificial intelligence (AI) has recently regained the limelight, as the human world chess champion was beaten by Deep Blue, a program written by a team of researchers and programmers from IBM. Even more recently, a "re-match" against a distributed machine in Jerusalem also favored a computer program. In the more difficult field of partial information and chance games, such as Poker, AI programs now hold their own against human champions, as exhibited in a competition held during AAAI-2008. True AI applications are also on the rise, from expert systems for diagnosis and advice, through increasingly intelligent robots, to intelligent and autonomous www agents.

This course deals with the issues of defining intelligence and rationality in an agent, various methods of formalizing them, and models for representing and using knowledge. In specific topics, mainly search, logical reasoning, and probabilistic reasoning, the course will focus all the way down to the algorithm level, in order to provide some hands-on experience with programming artificially intelligent agents.

Course data and information pointers

• Course Reference: Artificial Intelligence (202-1-5151) - Semester A 2009-2010 (Fall 2009)
• Credits: 4
• Instructor: Prof. Solomon Eyal Shimony
• Graders: Doron Zarchy, Yossi Rubin (Yossi Rubin's grading web page)
• Course scheduled at:
  1. Monday 10-12, building 34, room 205.
  2. Wednesday 9-11, building 34, room 205.
• Syllabus and requirements
• Midterm exams, (use of books and notes allowed):
  • 1st midterm exam: December 11, 2009, 9-11 AM, Building 90, room 125. (Note changed date, originally Dec. 4.)
  • 2nd midterm exam: January 15, 2010, 9-11 AM, Building 90, room 127. Grades.
• Assignments under construction. Assignments 1 and 2 valid.
  1. Assignment 1: Environments and search (simplified, deterministic). Part I due Nov. 2.
     Some example graphs.
  2. Assignment 2: Adversarial games. Due December 11. Extended to Dec 18 due to midterm exam rescheduling.
  3. Assignment 3: Exercise on agents, search, and logical reasoning. Due December 9, 2009, solo submission (past). Solutions.
  4. Assignment 4: Partial observability - reasoning. Due December 31, 2009.
  5. Assignment 5: Partial observability - decision-making. Due January 10, 2010.
  6. Assignment 6: Exercise on reasoning and decision making under uncertainty, and learning. Due January 13, 2010, solo submission. Solutions.
  7. Assignment 7: Partial observability - reasoning and decision-making (bonus assignment). Due February 15, 2010.
• Example quiz and Answers
• Lecture topics and notes.

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