Pacman vs Wumpus World

Over the last few years, we’ve used the Wumpus World environment (BotEnvironment and WumpusEnvironment) for several of the lab and homework activities. While it works, it has its quirks, which is not surprising considering that it’s essentially an enhanced extra-credit assignment done by Matt Colón, a former 480 student.

I just saw that the Stanford AI course (which will also be offered online for free) uses a
Pacman environment written in Python for the Search algorithms assignment. If anybody is interested in doing this instead of the Wumpus World, let me know. What’s especially appealing to me, of course, is the auto-grading option that they apparently use. While I don’t know this, I assume they will use the auto-grade option for the online version as well. To get the assignment graded by their system, you’ll have to enroll in the online course, and select the “advanced” option.

This may be especially interesting for the teams working on a Pacman team project anyway.

Lab and Assignment Submission via Blackboard

Blackboard is a bit picky with respect to the file types it accepts, and may balk at attempts to submit archive files such as .zip, .gz, .tar, etc. If this happens, you can add an extension like .pdf to the archive. So instead of submitting 480F11-fkurfess-L2.zip, submit 480F11-fkurfess-L2.zip.pdf.

Various Feedback Forms Available

I’m using a few Web questionnaires to collect feedback about various aspects of the class; please check the Class Feedback page for the links.

Lab 9 Available: Decision Tree Learning

The lab for this week is available. Since we haven’t’ discussed the topic “Learning” yet, I’m moving the deadline to Tue, Nov. 22, end of the day.

Lab Week 8 Available: Agents and Reasoning

The lab for Week 8 is now available.

Lab Week 7 Available: Hexagonal Wumpus World Exploration

The lab for this week is now available.

Quiz Week 6 on Tue, Oct. 25

We will have the usual quiz on Tue this week, on the topic “Local Search and Constraint Satisfaction.” As usual, it will be available from 9:30 - 11:00 for the morning section, and 4:30 - 6:00 in the afternoon, with a 1 hour time limit.

Lab Week 6 Available

I just published the lab for this week. I changed the topic from “local search methods” to “Games and AI”.

Lab 5 Available

The lab for Week 5 is now available.

Lab 2: Auto-Step Solution for BotEnvironment

Here’s a solution for the missing Auto-Step behavior in the environment for Lab2; thanks, Alan!


Author: Alan Phu Truong.

Solution:

Instead of using the following to start your environment:
java -classpath .:WumpusEnvironment.jar BotEnvironment.WumpusEnvironment

Use:
java -Xint -classpath .:WumpusEnvironment.jar BotEnvironment.WumpusEnvironment

AutoStep seems to work under more circumstances with this flag.

-Xint: Operate in interpreted-only mode. Compilation to native code is disabled, and all bytecodes are executed by the interpreter. The performance benefits offered by the Java HotSpot VMs' adaptive compiler will not be present in this mode.See http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.3/docs/tooldocs/linux/java.html



I’ve also added a pointer to additional material on Blackboard (under BotEnvironment JavaDocs, BotEnvironment Tutorial, and BotEnvironment FAQ) to the Lab 2 description.


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Lab 3 Available

The lab for Week 3 is now available.

Lab 4 Available

Lab 4 (AI Characters in movies or TV) is now available. After the more coding-intensive work on Lab 3, this one is more along the lines of the Chatbot assignment from the first week.

Lab 3 Hint: Agent Movement towards the Goal