Home Page for CSC 8520 Artificial Intelligence
Wednesday 6:15 to 8:45 in Mendel 158
Dr. David Matuszek, Mendel 162C, (610) 519-5654
Spring 2000, Villanova University

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Last update: March 27, 2000.

 

Final Project:

Please write up a short (one page or less) description of your final programming project by the end of this week, that is, by March 31. This can be e-mail if you prefer. I would like this description to contain:

  • What the program is supposed to do. Please be as explicit as possible.
  • What you think is the absolute minimum that your program should do in order to be regarded as a complete working program. Try to make this as small and doable as possible.
  • What you would like to have your program do, above and beyond the absolute minimum. You may want to prioritize the extra features.

I am a strong believer in getting a program to work before making it fancy. By all means tell me what you would like your program to do, but also tell me what you think your program must do, and make it clear which part is which. I'll provide feedback on your projects as soon as possible, especially if I think it's inappropriate or too ambitious.

Student Presentations, March 15-22

Announcements:

Syllabus

Getting started on your topic:

  1. www.aaai.org has lots of current stuff, including an interesting section called AI Topics which provides a not-very-technical starting point for  about two dozen topics, and includes "good places to start" for each.
  2. www.ijcai.org has conference topics and will at least give an idea of  what's current and who's doing it.
  3. The CMU AI repository page has a lot of FAQs and software. Just looking at the areas it covered can give a good start.

I've written a Four-Minute Guide to Resolution. There's a great Monty Python scene that John Ioannidis has turned into a resolution proof--here's his original version and my own rearrangement which combines both of the above.

If you are interested in learning more about Prolog, I've written a Concise Introduction to Prolog which I'll be updating in the next couple of weeks, to make sure it corresponds to the free SWI-Prolog. A much fancier version is the freeware Visual Prolog, but the latter has some nonstandard modifications.

The Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook is a good place to learn about Alan Turing and the Turing Test, as described in his 1950 paper, "Computational Machinery and Intelligence." Please read this classic paper.

The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has a good article on John Searle's Chinese Room Argument, which you should also read.