CSC 380/480 - Foundations of Artificial Intelligence - Winter 2007

• Final Exam Review Guide
• Final Exam Date: Tuesday, Mar. 13.

  Important Notes:

  1. Final exam will be held in class.
  2. The exam will be open book and open notes.
  3. The basic format of the exam questions will be similar to the problems in the assignments and the various examples covered in the lectures
  4. The time limit for the exam will be 3 hours, starting at 6 PM.
  5. Be sure to check the Final Exam review guide for the list of topics and material covered in the final exam.

As an alternative to the final exam you may do a final programming project. The project must involve the implementation of a system or a component of a system that uses some of the primary concepts covered in this class, such as heuristic search (e.g., A* algorithm), inference mechanisms based on propositional or first-order logics, etc. If you intend to do a project, you should submit a proposal or a detailed description of your project ideas for feedback. Please submit your proposal by email, no later than Friday, February 16.

Some project ideas that have been discussed in class include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Create a simulation environment for 8-puzzle (or some other single player game or puzzle, such as 8-queens or Towers on Hanoi) which solves specific instances of the problem using blind search strategies (depth-first, breadth-first), as well as informed search such as A* (using at least two admissible heuristics) and compares the performance of these strategies in terms of the number of nodes expanded, etc. The input would be a specific (possibly randomly generated) instance of the problem. The output would be the solution (sequence of steps) for each algorithms and the performance results.

• Create a simulation environment for the Wumpus World described in class (see also Chapter 7). Your program should randomly generate an instance of the environment (the grid with locations for the Wumpus, gold, pits, etc.), and your (automated) agent should then attempt to find the gold in that instance of the environment. Note that this would require the agent to be able to do some basic reasoning such as that described in Chapter 7.

• Develop an agent that can play a  two player game (such as tic-tac-toe) based on a heuristic evaluation function, incorporating techniques such as minimax procedure and alpha-beta pruning (See Chapter 6).

• Develop a full inference mechanism for backward chaining based on generalized Modus Ponens (See the project idea mentioned in Assignment 3). The input to your program should be a knowledge-base (in the proper format) and a sentence to be proved (a query, The output should be the possible answers for the query variables.

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