Course Expectation AI Fall 1999

CSC 5075 Elements of Artificial Intelligence: Fall 1999

TTh 19:25-20:40
Dr. J.P.E. Hodgson
Office: BL 242
Office Hours: TTh 18:15 - 19:15

Course Description

The aim of this course is to introduce you to the basic ideas of " classical AI". We will cover the first eight chapters of the book " Computational Intelligence". This will allow us to address the three central issues of classical AI -- knowledge representation, search and inference. We will examine a number of application areas in detail to show how these ideas are used in real systems.

Book

Computational Intelligence: A Logical Approach David Poole, Alan Mackworth, and Randy Goebel
The book is availalbe from Barnes and noble Online. Thanks to Joe Kampf for this information.

Assignments and Examinations

There will be a mid term and a final. In addition there will be six short assignments due during the semester and one comprehensive project due at the end of the semester. Credit will be awarded as follows:

Midterm	20
Final	30
Term Project	20
Short assignments 5 points each	30
Total	100

The assignments can be found on the web pages for the course. It is extremely important that you keep up with the assignments. Late assignments will be penalised with a loss of 1 point for each calendar day or part thereof that they are late -- the clock starts to run at 21:00 on the due day.

The midterm will be on Thursday October 14th

Grading Policy. My grading is guided by two principles:

Elegance is not optional. -- Richard O'Keefe

and

Anyone can write an efficient program if it doesn't have to be correct. -- Anon.

Therefor my first requirement is that your assignments be manifestly correct. By this I mean that the documentation should make it absolutely clear what is going on. I do not expect to have to (nor will I) read your code to find out how it works. The five points for each assignment will be allocated as follows:

Component	Purpose	Value
Header	What does the program do?	1
Body	How does it do it?	2
Code	The actual code	1
Output	A Printout	1

Special Note: unless the assignment calls for it your program must not be menu driven. Programs that use menus where they were not requested will be returned ungraded.

In the case of assignments that do not require programming the grading practices adopt a philosophy similar to that given above. Course grades will be awarded as follows:

Score	Grade
95 - 100	A
90 - 94	A-
84 - 89	B+
75 - 83	B
65 - 74	C
less than 65	F

Academic Honesty

All students are expected to familiarise themselves with the University's honor code -- see pages 18 to 20 of the graduate catalog. Students may discuss assignments with others. Any significant help (that is more than 5% of the effort involved) MUST be explicitly acknowledged. A sentence of the following form should appear in the header material of the assigment either:

Help equivalent to 15% of the effort required for this assignment was received from A.N. Other.

All the work for this assignment was carried out by Jean Untel.

Failure to acknowledge assistance is a violation of the honor code. The penalty for violating the code is a zero for the assignment. A second infraction will result in an F for the course.