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Lecturer: Dr W.F. Clocksin
(wfc@cl.cam.ac.uk)
No. of lectures: 12
Prerequisite course: Prolog for Artificial Intelligence
Aims
The aim of this course is to introduce the principles and applications
of those aspects of artificial intelligence that are not covered by
other courses. Other courses relevant to AI are: Prolog (from
Part IB), Computer Vision, Neural Computing, Information Retrieval, and Natural Language Processing. This
course is more about issues and ideas than about problems and their
solutions. No advanced mathematics is required, only basic
programming experience and a working knowledge of Prolog. For these
reasons, there will be four unassessed Examples Classes instead of
supervisions. The Examples Classes will work through typical
examination questions and discuss issues of interest to the
participants.
Topics
- Problems and challenges.
Why is something that looks so easy to do actually so difficult to
compute?
- Theories and methods.
What approaches have been tried?
- AI programming.
What is LISP for, and how does it relate to Prolog?
- Constraints.
How can one exploit the natural structure of a problem in order to
solve it?
- Knowledge representation.
What are the problems with representing commonsense knowledge?
- Reasoning.
What formal methods are there for dealing with ill-posed problems?
- Inference.
What follows from what? How do you know it does?
- Fuzzy logic.
How can one compute and control using approximations in the absence of
a model of the process?
- Qualitative control.
How little precision can you get away with?
- Search.
What are some ways of looking for something?
- Planning.
How can you figure out what to do before you do it?
- Decision making.
What is a basis for making a decision, and why does it matter?
Objectives
At the end of the course students should
- appreciate the distinction between the popular view of the field and
the actual research results
- appreciate different perspectives on what the problems of artificial
intelligence are and how different approaches are justified
- be able to design problem-solving methods based on search and
reasoning techniques
- know how to model situations and actions using a variety of knowledge
representation techniques
Recommended books
Luger, G.F. & Stubblefield, W.A. (1998). Artificial Intelligence:
Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving. Addison-Wesley.
Russell, S. & Norvig, P. (1995). Artificial Intelligence: A
Modern Approach. Prentice-Hall.
Shoham, Y. (1994). Artificial Intelligence Techniques in
Prolog. Morgan Kaufmann.
Next: Specification and Verification I
Up: Michaelmas Term 1999: Part
Previous: VLSI Design
Christine Northeast
Mon Sep 20 10:28:43 BST 1999