Monash University

Offered

Clayton First semester 2008 (Day)
Sunway Second semester 2008 (Day)

Synopsis

This unit includes history and philosophy of artificial intelligence; intelligent agents; problem solving and search (problem representation, heuristic search, iterative improvement, game playing); knowledge representation and reasoning (extension of material on propositional and first-order logic for artificial intelligence applications, situation calculus, planning, frames and semantic networks); expert systems overview (production systems, certainty factors); reasoning under uncertainty (belief networks compared to other approaches such as fuzzy logic); machine learning (decision trees, neural networks, genetic algorithms).

Objectives

At the completion of this unit students will have knowledge and understanding of:

1. the historical and conceptual development of AI;
2. the goals of AI and the main paradigms for achieving them, including logical inference, search, nonmonotonic logics, neural network methods and Bayesian inference;
3. the social and economic roles of AI;
4. heuristic AI for problem solving;
5. basic knowledge representation and reasoning mechanisms;
6. automated planning and decision-making systems;
7. probabilistic inference for reasoning under uncertainty;
8. machine learning techniques and their uses;
9. foundational issues for AI, including the frame problem and the Turing test;
10. AI programming techniques;

At the completion of this unit students will have developed attitudes that enable them to:

1. appreciate the potential and limits of the main approaches to AI;
2. be ready to reason critically about claims of the effectiveness of AI programs.

At the completion of this unit students will have the skills to:

1. analyse problems and determine where AI techniques are applicable;
2. implement AI problem-solving techniques in Lisp;
3. compare AI techniques in terms of complexity, soundness and completeness.

Assessment

Assignments: 40%; Examination (3 hours): 60%.

Contact hours

3 x contact hrs/week

Prerequisites

FIT2004 or CSE2304

Prohibitions

CSC2091, CSC3091, CSE2309, CSE3309, DGS3691, GCO3815, GCO7835, RDT3691