CS 520 • Intelligent Systems

Spring 2015

For it is impossible to conceive that ever bare incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being, as that nothing should of itself produce Matter.

John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690

Table of Contents

Course Description

The data structures and algorithms used give computer programs intelligent behavior. Topics include search, representation and reasoning, and machine learning. Prerequisites: Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (CS 502), and Data Structures and Algorithms (CS 503).

The course is divided into seven two-week sections. See the schedule for details.

Class meets on Tuesdays in Howard Hall 139 (through the Pollak art gallery; the sign in the hallway is 139, but the sign by the door is L512) and on Thursdays in Howard Hall 209 from 7:25 to 9:15 p.m. on both days. First day of class is Tuesday, 20 January; last day of class is Thursday, 30 April. Monday, 30 March, is the last day to withdraw from class with a W. There are no classes on Tuesday and Thursday, 17 and 19 March (Spring Break).


• indicates an assignment due day.

Objectives

This course’s main objective is to understand intelligent program behavior by learning A more general objective is to extract the principles used by reasoning techniques so they may be applied more generally and for further development in intelligent systems.

Instructor

R. Clayton, rclayton@monmouth.edu. Office hours are from 6 to 7 on Tuesdays and Thursdays (schedule) in HH 310 (the wireless lab).

Grading

There are two grade sources, one positive and the other negative. There are no other grade sources: no (other) homework assignments, no tests, no reports, no presentations.

Programming Assignments

There are six programming assignments, one for each starting with the second section; see the schedule for details.

Mud Cards

A mud card is a card containing a single question about the current section’s readings. Every student registered for the course should turn in a mud card within fifteen minutes of the start of every regularly scheduled class except the first class (Tuesday, 20 January). Each mud card not turned in during a section reduces the programming assignment grade by a quarter point (0.25 points).

Tests

Apart from possible pop quizzes, there are no tests in this course.

Final Grade

The final grade is the straight, unweighted average of highest five programming assignment grades; the lowest programming assignment grade is dropped.

Pop Quizzes

Pop quizzes occur spontaneously. A pop quiz is no more than five minutes long, and is given as soon as the class period starts. A pop-quiz grade ranges from 0 to 5 (inclusive on both ends) and is unappealable; see the pop-quiz rules for full details.

Grade Range

The grade ranges for this class are nonstandard:
40<A ≤45
35<A-≤40
30<B+≤35
25<B ≤30
20<B-≤25
15<C+≤20
10<C ≤15
5<C-≤10
0<F ≤5
All grades are kept with one digit of precision to the right of the decimal point and 0.05 rounded up. No grades are adjusted to a curve; that means, for example, that 35 is always a B+, never an A-.

Media

Textbook

The textbook for this course is Artificial Intelligence by David Poole and Alan Mackworth, Cambridge University Press, 2010. There is an on-line version of the book.

Poole and Mackworth can get intense, so you may want to have another book or two to help you over the rough spots. See the bibliography for more details.

This is a programming course, and you’ll be programming in Java. You should have at hand at least one Java programming language book to help you recover old details and pursue new details. The book from CS 175 and 176 should be fine. Also recommended are Core Java 2, Vol. 1 — Fundamentals by Cay Horstmann and Gary Cornell, Sun Microsystems Press, 2008. and Java in a Nutshell by David Flanagan, O’Reilly Media, 2005.

E-Mail

Feel free to send e-mail to rclayton@monmouth.edu . Unless I warn you beforehand, I’ll usually respond within a couple of hours during the usual work days; if I don’t respond within a day, resend the message.

Mail relevant to the class are stored in a hyper-mail archive. If your message is of general interest to the class, I’ll store it, suitably stripped of identification and along with my answer, in the archive.

Home page

This is the class home page; if you’re reading this on paper, you can also find it at www.monmouth.edu/rclayton/web-pages/s15-520/index.html ( tinyurl.com/mucs520s15h ). I’ll make the class notes, assignments, and other material available off the schedule www.monmouth.edu/rclayton/web-pages/s15-520/schedule.html ( tinyurl.com/mucs520s15s ); you should get in the habit of checking the schedule regularly.

Podcasts

The lectures for this class will be recorded and made available via the schedule and by an rss feed.

Microblogging

Follow the course on twitter ( twitter.com/mucs520 ).

Policies

Assistance

People who need assistance or accommodations above and beyond what is usually provided in class should contact the University’s ADA/504 coordinator to get those needs met. See the Disability Services page for more details.

Attendance

I have no class attendance policy; you may attend class or not as you see fit. However, I hold you responsible for knowing everything that goes on in class; “I wasn’t in class for that.” is not an acceptable excuse for a wrong answer, or for giving no answer at all.

My attendance policy applies only to lecture attendance; it does not apply to other kinds of attendance which may be required for the course. Repeated failures to meet the attendance expectations set for tests, meetings, projects, labs or other forms of course work will have a bad influence on your grade.

Cheating

I deal with suspected cheating by failing first and asking questions later. Although cheating has many forms, I generally consider cheating to be any attempt to claim someone else’s work as your own; also, I consider both the provider and the user of the work guilty of cheating. See the chapters on Academic Information and the Student Code of Conduct in the Student Handbook for more details.

Complaining about Grades

I recognize and encourage a student’s sacred right to complain about their grade. There are, however, a few rules under which such complaining should take place, and those students who don’t follow the rules will be less successful in their complaints than those students who do follow the rules.

First, the only complaint that matters is that something got marked wrong when it was actually right. When you come to complain, be prepared to present, in explicit detail, what it is you did and why you think it’s right.

Second, complaints about a particular test or assignment are only valid until the next test or assignment is due; after that point the book is permanently closed on all previous test or assignment grades.

Late Assignments

Assignments should be turned in by their due date; assignments turned in after their due date are late. You should contact me as soon as possible if you need to negotiate a due-date extension. The longer you wait to negotiate, the less likely it is you’ll be successful; in particular, you have almost no chance of getting an extension if you try for one the day before the due date, and you have no chance of getting an extention on the due date.

A late assignment is penalized ten points a day for each day it’s late. I use a 24-hour clock running from midnight to midnight to measure days; note this means that an assignment handed in the day after it’s due is penalized ten points: five for the day it was due and five for the next day.

Links

A collection of AI web pages.

A trip through Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.

Deep thoughts about What Do You Think About Machines That Think?

This page last modified on 2015 February 18.

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