CPE/CSC 480 Artificial Intelligence Syllabus

General Information

• Course Description: [from the Cal Poly 2003-5 Catalog]

"Programs and techniques that characterize artificial intelligence. Programming in a high level language. 3 lectures, 1 laboratory. "

Prerequisites: CSC 103 (Fundamentals of Computer Science III) and CSC 141 (Discrete Structures I)
Students should be familiar with programming in Java, and be able to work with elementary logic in propositional and predicate calculus environments.
• Goals and Objectives The goal of this course is to understand important problems, challenges, concepts and techniques from the field of Artificial Intelligence. In order to achieve this, students learn how to analyse, design, and program intelligent agents of varying complexities. These agents gather information from their environment, convert it into a suitable internal representation (which may be augmented with information provided by the designer), analyse their internal knowledge to determine suitable actions, and finally execute some actions. More specifically, after successfull completion of the course, students should
  1. know classical examples of artificial intelligence
  2. know characteristics of programs that can be considered "intelligent"
  3. understand the use of heuristics in search problems and games
  4. know a variety of ways to represent and retrieve knowledge and information
  5. know the fundamentals of artificial intelligence programming techniques in a modern programming language
  6. consider ideas and issues associated with social technical, and ethical uses of machines that involve artificial intelligence

Textbooks

• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Second Edition) by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig;
  Prentice Hall, 2003. ISBN 0-13-103805-2.

• A comparison of AI text books by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig can be found at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/competing.html.
• The lecture notes from MIT's course on Artificial Intelligence are available through their OpenCourseWare project at ocw.mit.edu. The topics covered are similar to ours, and some of the notes contain nice examples.
• Another AI textbook with an agent-based perspective is Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis by Nils J. Nilsson, Morgan Kaufmann, 1998, ISBN 1-55860-467-7.
• The fourth edition of "Artificial Intelligence - Structures and Strategies for Problem Solving" by George F. Luger , Addison Wesley, 2002, ISBN 0201-64866-0 is based on a more traditional approach to AI, with less emphasis on intelligent agents.
• A more philosophically oriented treatment of the major AI topics is Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence -- A Methodological and Computational Analysis by Achim Hoffmann, Springer-Verlag, August 1998, ISBN 981-3083-97-2.

• AI for Game Developers. David M. Bourg, Glenn Seeman, O'Reilly July 2004, ISBN 0-596-00555-5, 400 pages, $39.95 US. The complete set of examples from this book is available at http://examples.oreilly.com/ai/.
• AI Game Programming Wisdom Edited by Steve Rabin. Charles River Media, ISBN 1-58450-077-8, Price $69.95, March 2002.
• AI Game Programming Wisdom Vol. 2 Edited by Steve Rabin. Charles River Media, ISBN 1-58450-289-4, $69.95, December 2003, Book/CD (Win/Linux) 732 pages.
• AI Game Development: Synthetic Creatures with Learning and Reactive Behaviors. Alex Champandard, New Riders, ISBN 1592730043; $49.99, Nov 2003.

Lecture Notes

Additional Material

Grading Policy