CPSC 120, Fall 2002                   Information About the Final Exam
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   The final exam for this course takes place at 7:00 PM on Thursday,
December 19, in our usual classroom.  You can expect it to be six pages
long.  The final exam period is three hours long, but most people will
finish well before the time is up.  The exam is cumulative, but there
will be some emphasis on the material we have done since the third
test.  You can expect 40 to 50 percent of the test to be on the newer
material (Chapters 4 and 12, Labs 12 and 13).  You should also expect
some sort of general question on complexity, which has been a major
theme of the course.  You are not required to know the assembly language
of the xComputer.  You will be no recursive xTurtle subroutines.
You will not have to prove the unsolvability of the Halting Problem,
although you should know what it is and why it is significant.  There
will be nothing about Blender or PHP.
   I will distribute a copy of the final exam from last term, without
the answers.  This is meant as an example of what a final exam is like.
It does not include every sort of question that might be on the exam
for this term.
   There will be a Question-and-Answer session in our regular classroom
on Wednesday, December 18.  This is opportunity for you to come and
ask questions as a group.  I will have office hours at the following
times (and might be on campus at other times too):

         Sunday,    December 15:  1:00--3:00 PM
         Tuesday,   December 17:  11:00--11:50 AM and 1:30--3:00 PM
         Wednesday, December 18:  10:00--12:00 AM and 1:00--3:00 PM
         Thursday,  December 19:  12:00--1:30 PM and 6:30--7:00 PM


Here are some of the important terms and ideas from recent material:

   Computational Universality
   equivalence of all computers
   simulation
   Church-Turing thesis
   Turing machines:
      tape, cells, symbols, blank cell, states, halt state,
      how a Turing machine computes, table of rules,
      how to use a Turing machine to compute a function
   unsolvable problems
   the Halting Problem
   implications of the unsolvability of the Halting Problem

   artificial intelligence             Godel's Theorem and the limits of logic 
   Turing test                         embodied intelligence                   
   physical symbol system hypothesis   the Chinese room                        
   heuristic                           the problem of consciousness            
   natural language processing         solipcism                               
   machine translation                 neural nets                             
   expert system                       emergence                               
   knowledge representation            artificial life                         
   common sense                        genetic algorithm                       
   arguments for and against AI
 
You might also want to look on-line at http://math.hws.edu/eck/cs120/
where you will find the review sheets for the three tests and also
sample solutions for the tests.