This course will look at the past, present, and future of AI and its
impact, and will involve essays based on readings, as well as hands-on
projects exploring and assessing the state of the art in selected subfields
of AI. The emphasis will be on “strong AI”, i.e., the attempt to
achieve human-level AI (and perhaps go beyond it). The course will be
suitable for writing credit.
Prerequisites: (173 AND 240) or 242 or 280 or 282. (See comments below.)
Lectures: Tuesday and Thursday, 11:05a.m. to 12:20 p.m., in CSB 601.
make and
rcs/cvs/bitkeeper is an asset.
A strongly recommended item for preliminary reading is Prof. Michael Scott's wonderful 2003 commencement address for the CSC graduating class, Onward and Upward Forever?. This nicely anticipates and sets the stage for some of the themes that are the focus of this course.
Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, Oxford U.P., 1999.
Sam Williams, Arguing A.I. : The Battle for Twenty-first-Century Science, AtRandom, 2002 (paperback). [Past, present, future of AI, with discussion of the views of McCarthy, Kurzweil, etc. Quite interesting as a general nontechnical overview.]
John Brockman (ed.), The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century, Vintage, 2002 (paperback). [This will help to put forecasts about the future of AI in a broader context. The AI representatives are Rodney Brooks, Roger Schank and John Holland. There's also Dawkins (biology), Smolin (physics), Rees (SETI), and a dozen other respectable authors.]
Drew McDermott, Mind and Mechanism, MIT Press, 2001.
[This is a book on consciousness -- the only one so far written by an AI researcher.]
A possible addition is
Martin Rees, Our Final Hour, Basic Books, 2003. [A book by Britain's Astronomer Royal about existential threats to humanity in the next 50 years.]
Also one of the following books on the history of AI may be added:
James P. Hogan, Mind Matters, 1997. [Past and future of AI. Careful, well-written, popular treatment, but a lot of the material is at the level of introductory tutoring in boolean logic, basic ideas of cybernetics, game playing, problem solving, etc. NLU stops with Yale and Jaime Carbonnell. A possible alternative to McCorduck, though not quite as engaging, and rather “neo-conventional” in outlook.]
Essays will be approximately 1500-2500 words in length. An essay at the short end of this range is alright if you have the skill to make your claims and arguments succinctly, and without becoming cursory or superficial. There is no penalty for going over the upper limit, unless it is through repetitiveness or irrelevancies.
One kind of place to look for examples of the kind of writing to strive for is in book reviews, in refereed journals, of some of the readings for this course.
Essays will be graded on 3 dimensions, roughly as follows:
For more detailed guidelines about good essay style/organization, see
Mark Andrews (Cornell U.) 2001 notes at
http://www2.psych.cornell.edu/andrews/fws01/essay_elements.html
and Dr. Messerly's UTexas we site
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/messerly/paper.htm
The subfields are those directly concerned with cognition, in the sense of higher-level mental functions such as:
The class will be organized into teams of 4 or 5 students, and each team will attempt to assess and demonstrate the state of the art in a particular subfield in the following way:
Team members will present status reports to the rest of the class on a regular basis, via semi-formal discussion sessions in which team understanding, approaches, and progress will be critiqued and potentially modified. Teams will also prepare biweekly written reports, and will hand in a final project report prior to the final project presentation.
Teams and topics will be selected by the instructor and TA a couple of weeks into the course on the basis of survey information, class discussion, and student preferences. Our hope is that most students who are going to drop the course will have done so by that time, so we can have stable teams. Depending on class size, we may have more than one team on a project, in semi-competition.
Grading will be based about 40% on your essays, 40% on your project accomplishments and presentations (including at least one demonstration), and 20% on class attendance/participation. I do not anticipate giving any exams.
Essays and reports must be handed in in time.
Exceptions will be made only under the most dire of circumstances.
Student conduct in CSC 290 is governed by the College
Academic Honesty Policy, the
Undergraduate Laboratory Policies
of the Computer Science Department, and the
Acceptable Use Policy of Academic Technology Services.
As in all intellectual endeavors, proper attribution of work is crucial
in the essays and project reports you submit. Be sure to provide proper
references to the software and documentation you acquire for the project
(naturally, describing any additions or modifications you made), and
in your essays and reports provide citations in standard form for any
text and ideas taken from other sources. Use of unattributed material is
plagiarism.
Students in CSC 290/04
Academic Honesty
Last Change:
04 March 2004 /
schubert@cs.rochester.edu