COMP9414 Artificial Intelligence
COMP9814 Extended Artificial Intelligence

Class Announcements from Previous Years

2011 Semester 1 Announcements

• 15 June 11: Bill's pre-exam consulting time on Wed 22 June changed from 10-12 to 10.30-12.30

• 2 June 11: Remember the Chomsky hierarchy from the Grammars and Parsing section of NLP (page 9)? Noam Chomsky is in the news today.

• Thanks to those who have done the CATEI survey for COMP9414/9814. For the rest, this is a reminder to go to my UNSW and do the survey soon. Or even now!

  Pre-exam Consultation Times
  Bill	Wed 22 June 10am10.30am-12noon12.30pm 2pm-4pm	Room 405 CSE Building
  Wayne	Wed 22 June 2.30pm-4pm	J17-433
  Bill chose his times (a) to be close to the exam, because past experience shows that most students don't come at any other time; and (b) to be available to everybody: 25 people have COMP exams in the afternoon and 15 people have COMP exams in the morning, but everybody seems to be available at one or the other of these timeslots.

• 26 May 11: the lectopia recording of the week 12 COMP9814 lecture is available. Go to the Lectopia link above. It started late because no students showed up for quite a while, so the best place to start listening to the lecture is about 17 minutes and 45 seconds into the recording

• 19 May 11: the lectopia recording of the week 11 COMP9814 lecture is available. Go to the Lectopia link above.

• 18 May 11: the lectopia recording of the week 11 COMP9414 lecture is available. Go to the Lectopia link above.

• 12 May 11: the lectopia recording of the week 10 COMP9814 lecture is available. Go to the Lectopia link above.

• 11 May 11: the lectopia recording of the week 10 COMP9414 lecture is available. Go to the Lectopia link above. The actual lecture starts 7 minutes 4 seconds into the recording.

• 6 May 11: the lectopia recording of the week 9 COMP9414 lecture is available. Go to the Lectopia link above. The actual lecture starts 7 minutes 20 seconds into the recording.
  The lectopia recording of the week 9 COMP9814 lecture is also available. The actual lecture starts 7 minutes into the recording. A previous lecturer had tied the lapel microphone cord into an astoundingly complex knot, so if you want to listen to the recording of me untangling it, feel free to tune in earlier in the recording. :-(

• 27 April 11: the lectopia recording of the week 8 COMP9414 lectures is available. Go to the Lectopia link above, and then click on the one with the topic: Intro to Natural Language Processing, Grammars, Parsing.

• 14 April 11: COMP9814 lecture today is cancelled. The Monty Hall Problem will be discussed next week (April 21).

• 8 April 11: Bill will not be available for consultation in his regular 1-2pm Wednesday slot on Wednesday 20 April. Bill will also be away from UNSW from 9-19 April, so please send any urgent enquiries to Wayne Wobcke.

• 30 Mar 11: Solutions to exercises on search are available.

• 25 Mar 11: don't forget to check the Prolog assignment spec for clarifications (see table near top of spec) and to check the Class Forum for assignment-related discussion.

• 17 Mar 11: Lectopia recording of week 3 COMP9814 Extended AI lecture

• 17 Mar 11: I have revised the lecture slides and exercise sheet to further clarify how uniform-cost search handles repeated states (changes in the lecture slides are in blue and red).

• 10 Mar 11: Lectopia recording of week 2 COMP9814 Extended AI lecture

• 9 Mar 11: First programming assignment (Prolog programming assignment) is released today. Click on "Assignments" in the menu at left and then follow the link.

• 9 Mar 11: First lab class today. Lab classes are optional, but recommended.

• 2 Mar 11: AI in the news - link provided by Victor Bahamondes Benavente, who took COMP9414 in 2010.

10s1 Announcements

• 8 June 10: Click on "Grade Distributions ..." below, to see the mark distribution for the nlp assignment.

• 25 May 10: Click on "Consultations" at left for exam period consultation times for Bill.

• 22 Apr 10: The deadline for Assignment 2 is in Week 9, Wednesday May 5th (not May 12th as in the Assignment specification, which is in Week 10). This is also in agreement with the set up of the submission system.

• 20 Feb 10: For O-week, your COMP9414 or COMP9814 homework is to read the Course Introduction - there is a link to it at left. It is relatively long, but you should make sure you look at every section. Particularly important parts are the sections on Course Details (including the difference between COMP9414 and COMP9814), Assessment, the Course Schedule, and the Resources for Students. All of these are linked at the top of the course intro web page.

  If this is your first semester at UNSW, then you should definitely read the whole document carefully. You should also click all of the links at left, just to find out what's there.

09s1 Announcements

• 18 June 09: Provisional final result and assignment mark distributions are shown in the table further down this page.

• 2 June 09:
  • the audio of Bill's week 12 lecture (Revision/Sample Exam) can now be found on Lectopia.
  • There seems to have been a version difference between the material presented in Bill's lecture and the version on the Lecture notes part of the class home page. The class home page version is the more up to date one. However, the notes associated with Lectopia reflect what was actually presented in the lecture.

• 27 May 09:
  • the audio of the week 11 lectures (Machine Learning) can now be found on Lectopia (iLecture).
    
  • The week 11 review quiz is now available via the yellow menu on the class home page.
  • You can now try all the exercises in the Machine Learning exercise set.

• 24 May 09: pre-exam consultation times for Bill are now available here.

• 20 May 09:
  • the audio of the week 10 lectures can now be found on Lectopia (iLecture).
    
  • The week 10 review quiz is now available via the yellow menu on the class home page.
  • You can now try all the exercises in the "Semantics, Logical Form, Interpretation" exercise set.

• 13 May 09:
  • the audio of the week 9 lectures can now be found on Lectopia (iLecture).
    
  • The week 9 review quiz is now available via the yellow menu on the class home page.
  • The week 9 exercises are also available via the menu. The relevant exercise set is called "Semantics, Logical Form, Interpretation" and you can currently try questions 1 and 2. Questions 3 and 4 relate to the week 10 lectures.

• 6 May 09:
  • the audio of the week 8 lectures can now be found on Lectopia (iLecture).
    
  • Review Quiz questions for week 8's lecture are now available, too. Click on Review Quizzes in the yellow menu strip at left.
    
  • Also, there are exercise sets (more in-depth exercises) for the Grammars and Parsing lecture - click on Exercise Sets, then on "Grammars" and on "Parsing". The solution links for these are below the links to the questions.
    
  • Please remember that I emphasised in last night's lecture that
    1. you should spend some time going through the extended chart parsing example.
    2. you can now do the parsing (but not the semantics) part of the NLP assignment. I recommend starting this in the next week or so, in order to reduce the assignment load at the end of semester. If you do as I suggest, you will break the NLP assignment into two easier assignments. This will probably save you time in the long run, as it will reduce the cognitive complexity of the task, as you will not have to think about syntax and semantics at the same time. Reducing cognitive complexity is a top learning strategy.

• 28 April 09: Solutions to Exercise Set 6 are now available. (ps| pdf)

• 20 April 09: Solutions to Exercise Set 5 are now available. (ps| pdf)

• 2 April 09: Solutions to Exercise Set Weeks 3,4 are now available. (ps| pdf)

• 31 March 09: The wording of one sentence in the specification of incorporate_goals in Assignment 2 has been made clearer, as mentioned in lectures. This is on page 3 of the specification. New wording: a list to be computed which contains the new goals inserted into the current list of intentions in decreasing order of value, using the distance from the agent to break ties. The following sentence in the specification explains what this means more precisely.

• 18 March 09: the audio of the week 2 lectures can now be found on Lectopia (iLecture).
  Quiz questions for week 2's lecture are now available, too.

• 11 March 09: the audio of last night's lectures can be found here on the Lectopia (iLecture) system.
  You can also find some review questions about last night's lectures by clicking on "Review Quizzes" in the menu at left. Review Quizzes are completely voluntary.

• Week 1 (9-13 March 09): What you need to do in Week 1:
  
  1. Make sure you have done the things specified at the next numbered point, for week 0.
  2. Come to the lecture from 6-9pm on Tuesday in Lecture Room CLB 1. CLB stands for Central Lecture Block.
  3. There are no lab classes, and no extra COMP9814 lecture, in week 1.

• Week 0 (2-6 March 09): What you need to do in Week 0:
  
  1. Read the Course Introduction
  2. Consider attending Lab 0 in the Leaf and Spoons lab at 4-5pm on Thursday. See your Uni or School of CSE email for alternative times (but this time is specialised for postgrad students). If you've never used Unix/Linux before, definitely attend lab 0.
  3. While at lab 0, figure out how to print stuff, and print off the lecture notes for week 1 - click "Lecture Notes" at left to find them.

• 26 February 2009: these pages are now fully updated for 2009 session 1

• 8 December 2008: these pages are not yet fully updated for for 2009 session 1, but they will give a pretty good indication of the nature of the 09s1 version of COMP9414/9814, which will be taught by the same team as in 08s1.

• 11 July 2008: 2 students have received the grade of 00 FL for plagiarism following an investigation. Plagiarism investigations are one of the most unpleasant parts of a lecturer's job, but are essential to maintain the reputation of the degree for which you are studying.

• 20 June 2008: Provisional final result and assignment mark distributions are shown in the table at the foot of this page. In addition, the top provisional mark in COMP9414 was 90 and the top provisional mark in COMP9814 was 100.

• 10 June 2008: Comments on nlp assignment submissions:
  Some people, having discovered "=..", contorted their code in order to use it as often as possible. You use "=.." to build a term if the functor is only available as the binding of some variable, and not otherwise.

• 29 Apr: Tips on testing: Some of you would benefit from comparing your output with the sample output provided in assignment specs using an automated method - for example, using the Linux diff utility. To do this, copy and paste your output into a file (call it myoutput, say) and copy and paste the sample output into another file (call it sampleoutput, say), and then, after saving the files, issue the Linux command

     diff myoutput sampleoutput
     

  If there are no differences, diff will simply print another prompt. If there are differences, diff will print the pairs/groups of lines where there are differences - I suggest you begin by trying diff out on a pair of files where you deliberately create known differences. Running the Linux command

     man diff
     

  will allow you to learn more about diff.

• Prolog programming hints by demonstrator Ronnie Taib are available (584Kb)

• 18 Mar: someone asked me, after the lecture last night, whether it is possible to check the status of an assignment submission. In fact you can do this:
  
  • login to a CSE workstation or server
  • type 9414 classrun -check assignment_name
  where assignment_name is replaced by the name of the assignment that you are interested in, currently prolog (or extprolog if you are enrolled in COMP9814).