CSci 131: Computational Intelligence: A Freshman Seminar

Tentative Schedule

Note: It should be pointed out that different classes progress at different rates through different parts of the material. This schedule is only a draft of a reasonable schedule, and will likely be different for different groups of students (different classes in different semesters).

Last modified 5/29/03

• Week 1:
  • Reading: Descartes (all of the readings will be available in the coursepack, which will serve as the textbook for the course)
  • Activity:
    • Introduction to the course
    • Introduction to the problem
  • Assignment(s): "Read and Respond" to Descartes. A "Read and Respond" assignment is a short (one or two pages as required) response to questions about the article raised by the teacher. See my recent SCXT 350 class web pages (here) for some examples. These are graded (fairly liberally) and are included in the "Short Writings" evaluation.  (note to reviewers:  These can be thought of as preliminary writings leading to a term paper (except that they continue past the time the student selects a term paper topic and begins work on it).  One option might also be to open up these to peer review, or even ask students to read their response during the classroom discussion on the paper responded to).
• Week 2:
  • Reading: Coursepack (an introduction to the programming language LISP)
  • Activity:
    • The notion of an algorithm
    • Basic computer programming in the language LISP
  • Assignment(s): A series of short exercises in LISP
• Week 3:
  • Reading: Coursepack (a continuation of the introduction to the programming language LISP. Alternativly, we could add a textbook: Something like "Common Lispcraft", though this takes the student far further than is required for this course)
  • Activity: More on the syntax and semantics of the programming language LISP.
  • Assignment(s): A second set of LISP exercises.
• Week 4:
  • Reading: 
  • Turing paper (coursepack)
  • Marr paper (coursepack)
  • Activity: 
    • A first response to Descartes, and setting the stage for further discussion and some confusion.
    • An approach to explanation:  Marr paper
  • Assignment(s): "Read and Respond" to the Turing and Marr papers.
• Week 5:
  • Reading: Coursepack (more on Lisp)
  • Activity:
    • Recursion
    • Matching/Unification
    • Examination of "Eliza"
  • Assignment(s): 
  • A simple Eliza program? Possibly as a group project (this would fit nicely)
  • Discussion of the term paper

• Week 6:
  • Reading: Coursepack:
    • Some basics of formal languages
    • (Possibly) the Scientific American article on Turning Machines. This, however, is expensive!
  • Activity: Formal models of computation (i.e., What do we mean by computation when we say "Intelligence is computable?)
  • Assignment(s): An exercise in finite state automata, and an exercise in interpreting (not writing) one or more Turing machine examples (parity checking and the like - see Copeland for two examples).
• Week 7: (A continuation of week 6 and an exam)
  • Reading: Same as week 6
  • Activity: Same as week 6
  • Assignment(s):
    • Continuation of week 6
    • Exam 1
• Week 8:
  • Reading: (coursepack) Notes on either SNePS or CLIPS. Probably CLIPS, since it is easier to understand this very straight-forward expert system shell than it is to understand the propositional semantic networks of SNePS, but I may change my mind on this.
  • Activity: A brief look at knowledge representation
  • Assignment(s):
    • Probably a simple CLIPS exercise (see SCXT 350 for some possible examples)
    • Term paper proposals and thesis statements due
• Week 9:
  • Reading: Newell and Simon: The Physical Symbol System Hypothesis (coursepack)
  • Activity: GOFAI ("Good Old-Fashioned AI" (Boden): Symbolic AI
  • Assignment(s): Longer than usual "Read and Respond"
• Week 10:
  • Reading: Search in AI (coursepack)
  • Activity: Search was introduced in the Newell and Simon paper. We look at very basic search in this week and basic heuristic search in week 11.
  • Assignment(s): A simple puzzle (of some sort)
• Week 11:
  • Reading: Heuristic and A* search (coursepack)
  • Activity: Heuristic search
  • Assignment(s): Adding heuristics to a simple puzzle. Note: This can be very difficult - what I will do is to write most of the difficult machinery so that the students (perhaps working in teams) can simply add the puzzle details. In CSci 431 I expect the student to do everything.
• Week 12:
  • Reading: The connectionist approach (coursepack)
  • Activity: The connectionist (artificial neural network approach) as an alternate approach
  • Assignment(s):
    • Some simple perceptron networks (pen and paper)
    • Term paper draft due
• Week 13: Wrapping up and an exam
  • Reading:
    • The Chinese Room (John Searle - coursepack)
    • Pinker paper on language understanding
  • Activity: Searle's objection to all this. An introduction to the final topic.
  • Assignment(s): 
    • Two "Read and Respond" papers
    • Exam 2
• Week 14:
  • Reading: An introduction to Natural Language Understanding: Grammars and a response to Descartes (coursepack)
  • Activity: Simple natural language understanding using formal models for computation, and a response to Descartes.
  • Assignment(s): Exercises in simple grammars
• Week 15:
  • Reading: As needed
  • Activity: Wrap-up and review (with a bit of slack for catching up)
  • Assignment(s): Term paper due