Syllabus for CS251
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad field that draws on many disciplines, and so too will this course. The
use of the computer as a tool for research, and a firm grounding in computation distinguishes AI from other cognitive
sciences. Thus, this course will include readings on the philosophy of mind, logic, linguistics and computer programming
(mainly in Lisp).
The texts for the course include:
Note: Did you know that you can buy your textbooks online (for all classes, not just this one)? Both BigWords and Varsity Books sell textbooks from the Web. If you go to BigWords, tell them reference number 2681 sent you.)
AIMA is the main textbook and has become very popular with introductory AI classes nationwide. I evaluated several books, but chose AIMA because of its breadth of coverage. The book addresses natural language processing, robotics, vision and other topics not found in other texts.
Although I haven't used this book extensively myself, it looks well-written and covers CLOS2 as well as "ordinary" Lisp. I'm very interested in your thoughts on this book.
The MIT Press is rolling out a new encyclopedia, and is making the text available online. The articles are short, but the quality of insight and authorship is a bit uneven. Generally, I've assigned the readings as introductory material before tackling the AIMA textbook.
This is the definitive book on Lisp (and I do mean definitive). The text is a bit dated, the explanations long and detailed with a smattering of humor (try looking up "recursion" in the index). But if you want to know whether you're wrong or your Lisp compiler is, this is the place to go. If you're going to continue in AI or just with Lisp, you need this book.
Note: If a lecture title is linked, then the lecture is available online. See the heading Linked Lectures for more info on reading online lectures.
|
When |
Topic |
AIMA |
Lisp |
Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | And Now for Something Completely Different | |||
| Introduction to Macros | ||||
| Week 2 | More on Macros | Chapter 10 | Course notes | |
| Intro to Planning | Chapter 11 (Especially 11.4) | Planning | ||
| Week 3 | Planning (Tuesday, Thursday) | Chapter 13 (skim) | A Review of AI Planning Techniques | |
| A Cognitive Model of Planning | ||||
| Week 4 | Robotics (Tuesday) | Chapter 25 | Elephants Don't Play Chess (in PDF) (Tuesday) | |
| What are plans for? by Phil Agre (Thursday) | ||||
| Week 5 | Introduction to Computer Vision | Chapter 24 (skim) | A Guided Tour of Computer Vision (Chapter 1) by Nalwa | |
| Computer Vision I | Sections 24.3-24.6 | |||
| Week 6 | Computer Vision II | A Guided Tour of Computer Vision (Chapters 2,3) by Nalwa | ||
| Natural Language I | Chapter 22 (skim), Chapter 23 | |||
| Week 7 | Natural language - Syntax | Grammars and Parsing (Chapter 4 from Natural Language Processing) | ||
| Natural language - Semantics | Inside Computer Understanding, Chapters 1-3 | |||
| Week 8 | Natural language - Semantics | |||
| Week 9 | Natural language - Semantics | |||
| Uncertainty | Chapter 14 | |||
| Week 10 | Uncertainty/Wrap-up |
The lectures will usually be written in Microsoft PowerPoint '97, which means they can be read either with Office '97 (Windows) or Office '98 (Mac).
If you want to view the PowerPoint '97 files on a Mac that only has PowerPoint 4.0, you can download a converter from Microsoft.
To use the converter in the MacLab:
2. CLOS is the Common Lisp Object System, and brings together Lisp and object-oriented programming. CLOS has many powerful features as an OO language, and in fact is more powerful than C++ in some ways. (Return)
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