CS116 Artificial Intelligence

CS116 -- Artificial Intelligence
Spring, 2004
(last updated 4/7/2004)

Updates:

[4/7/2004] Details on the Agent Programming Contest is now available.
[1/24/2004] Please check out my page talking about what I expect for your reading analyses starting in a couple weeks.
[1/20/2004] If you're using pilot for your lisp assignments (or if you're using CLisp and want to interact with it via emacs), you may want to alter your .emacs file so that the inferior-lisp-program global variable gets set to "clisp" instead of the default "lisp". Also, for those using CMUCL, you might be interested in exploring hemlock, a graphical emacs-like editor integrated into CMUCL.

Professor:

Wayne Iba,
iba@westmont.edu,
http://homepage.westmont.edu/iba,
office: new Math and Computer Science Building,
phone: 565-6799

Office hours: TBA (or other times by arrangement)
Textbook:

[required] Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction, by Jack Copeland. Blackwell. (1993).
[suggested] Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis, by Nils J. Nilsson. Morgan Kaufmann. (1998).

Other Resources:

[optional reference] Common Lisp: The Language (second edition), Guy Steele. This book is available in html format here (but you might use this local gzipped tarball to save external bandwidth).
[useful tutorial] LISP Primer, by Colin Allen and Maneesh Dhagat.

Time and place: MWF 2:00-3:05, Voskul Library 106 (or 104?)

Syllabus (pdf).

Tentative class schedule

Course summary
This class will explore the principles of Artificial Intelligence from several perspectives. We will extensively consider the philosophy of mind as one approach to studying AI. We will also survey the methods and problems that have traditionally been associated with AI. We will also introduce the Lisp programming language and implement several small programs in Lisp. The course will be conducted as (roughly) one-third seminar, one-third tutorial and lab, and one-third lecture. The seminar component will involve reading philosophical and technical papers, writing analyses of the readings, and discussing these analyses in class. The goals of the course are to gain an understanding of the nature of intelligence, the problems with constructing computer artifacts that generate intelligent behavior, and the philosophical questions surrounding intelligence and mind.

You will want a copy of LISP on your machine. I recommend (and will be using) CMUCL. However, it only runs on Unix platforms. For those of you refusing to work in a Unix environment, CLISP is available for Microsoft platforms. I am also asking that CMUCL be installed on pilot.westmont.edu, so if you prefer not to deal with installation issues on either platform, you can go there for access to LISP.

Project possibilities:
There will be a term project as part of this class. You will have the option of preparing a coding-based project or a research and analysis-based paper. Details, requirements, and topic starters will be posted here and briefly discussed in class.

Acknowledgements: