CS 453: Artificial Intelligence, Spring 2005
Information About the Second Test

THE SECOND TEST for this course will be given on Friday, April 1. It will cover Chapters 6 and 7 from the textbook, omitting Section 6.5 and 7.6. Also not included is the material on circuit-based agents in Secton 7.7. The test will cover some material on Lisp, including the reading from the book ANSI Common Lisp.

You should also be familiar with the ideas and issues raised by the reading from ROBOT, by Hans Moravec, and the short story "How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good" by Stanislaw Lem. The ideas issues include, for example:

   The history of the development of autonomous mobile robots
   Moravec's ideas about the achievement of human equivalence by robots
   Predictions about capabilities of future computers
   Difficulty of programming computers to do things that are easy for people
   The difficulty of recognizing consciousness/intelligence in machines
   Ethical issues raised by the creation of conscious/intelligent machines
   Risks involved in the creation of conscious/intelligent machines

And here are some other important terms and ideas for the test:

   Adversarial search                               Logical agents                         
   Games: Deterministic                             Logic for knowledge representation     
          Full knowledge                            Knowledge Base (KB)                    
          Zero-sum                                  ASK and TELL operations                
   Game trees                                       Logical entailment                     
   Initial state                                    Models ("possible worlds")             
   Termination test                                 Propositional Logic                     
   Move generating function                         Sentences / atomic sentences           
   Minimax algorithm                                Logical operators                      
   Depth-limited minimax                            Literal                                
   Static evaluation function                       Positive and negative literals         
   Pruning and efficiency                           Logical equivalence                    
   Alpha-beta pruning                               Tautology                              
   Quiescence search                                Satisfiability                         
   Horizon effect                                   Inference methods                      
                                                    Model checking (truth tables)          
   Knowledge representation                         Complete inference method              
   Reasoning                                        Sound inference method                 
                                                    The modus ponens inference rule       
   Lisp for symbolic AI                             The resolution inference rule          
   Knowledge representation in Lisp                 Horn clauses                           
   The backquote operator in Lisp                   Forward chaining                       
   Functions as objects                             Data-driven reasoning                  
       the #' notation                              Backward chaining                      
       LAMBDA expressions                           Goal-driven reasoning                  
   Pattern matching in Lisp                         Problems with propositional logic
   How lists are stored in memory
   Dotted pair notation:  (a . b)
   Association list
   
   The "isa" relation
   Reasoning with an isa hierarchy
   Inheritance in an isa hierarchy:
       reasoning about "can" and "has"
   Monotonic and non-monotonic logics