CSCE 580 Fall 2009: Syllabus

The textbook is:

  • By special arrangement, we will also use a draft of: David Poole and Alan Mackworth. Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents, to appear (referred to as [P]).
  • A very good alternative text is: Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Second Edition). Prentice-Hall, 2003 (referred to as [R] or [AIMA] or [AIMA-2]). Supplementary materials from the authors, including an errata list, are available. This text is not required.

    • The main (approximately 80% of the time) instructional delivery strategy for this course is lectures. Discussions based on graduate student presentations, videos, quizzes or in-class exercises, and a possible invited talk will make up the remaining 20% of time. The first day of classes is Friday, August 21, 2009. The last day to withdraw without failure is Thursday, October 1, 2009. The last day of classes is Friday, December 4, 2009. The final exam for the course is Saturday, December 12, 2009, at 1400 in the classroom (SWGR 2A15). This is the regularly scheduled time for courses taught from 1325 to 1415 on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. (See the university exam schedule.)

    Please see elsewhere in the web pages for the course for additional administrative information.

    WeekLecture Topics
    1: August 21Introduction (Ch.1 [P])
    2: August 24, 26, 28Introduction; Intelligent Agents (Chs.1-2[P])
    3: August 31; September 2, 4The State-Space Approach to Problem Solving and Blind Search (Ch.3 [P])
    4: September 9, 11Graduate Student Presentation 1; Heuristic Search (Ch.3 [P])
    5: September 14, 16, 18Heuristic Search (Ch.3 [P]); Graduate Student Presentations 2 and 3
    6: September 21, 23, 25 Midterm 1; Constraint Satisfaction Problems (Ch.4 [P])
    7: September 28, 30; October 2Constraint Satisfaction Problems (Ch.4 [P])
    8: October 5, 7 The Propositional Calculus, Inference, and Abduction (Ch.5 [P])
    9: October 12, 14, 16 The Propositional Calculus, Inference, and Abduction (Ch.5 [P]); Graduate Student Presentation 4
    10: October 19, 21, 23 Reasoning Under Uncertainty (Ch.6 [P]); Graduate Student Presentation 5
    11: October 26, 28, 30 Individuals, Relations, and First-Order Logic (Ch.12 [P]); Graduate Student Presentation 6
    12: November 3, 5, 7 Individuals, Relations, and First-Order Logic (Ch.12 [P]); Graduate Student Presentations 7 and 8
    13: November 9, 11, 13 Supervised Learning (Ch.7 [P])
    14: November 16, 18, 20 Logic Programming (Notes, SWI-Prolog Reference Manual and AILog User Manual)
    15: November 23 Logic Programming (ctd.)
    16: November 30; December 2, 4 Logic Programming (ctd.)