CS 344 – Artificial Intelligence

Review 1
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Course description – The course has been designed to give a brief introduction to Artificial Intelligence and the associated topics. Main concepts include – search techniques, formal logic, probability and bayesian networks, neural networks, etc

 

Course pattern and logistics – There are 4 quizzes, a midsem and an endsem. The weightages depend on the instructor.

 

Comments on the instructor – Professor Siva Kumar took the course in Fall 2015. He is a good professor, however, the course coverage could have been better if the time management during the lectures was taken care of. More topics could have been covered during the course of the semester.
Who will find it interesting – The course is compulsory for CSE students. Non-CSE students who are interested in Artificial Intelligence may also find the course interesting. However, some portions of the course demand an understanding of Logic for CS (CS228). So, those who are interested in taking this course must have a basic understanding of propositional and first order logic.

Review 2
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Prof. G Sivakumar

 

Course Description :

The course was a basic introduction to AI techniques and algorithms. The topics included Search :

  • Minimax
  • Alpha Beta pruning
  • A* Search

 

Logic :

  • First Order Logic
  • Propositional Logic
  • Resolution
  • Prolog

 

Probabilistic models :

  • Bayesian networks
  • HMM
  • Neural Networks

 

The course had an associated lab with it, which had assignments to be coded in Prolog.

This also had 2 projects – one to write an AI for Planet Wars (Galcon) and another open project

 

Course Pattern and Logistics :

Course :

3 Quizzes (12% each)+ Midsem(24%) + Endsem(40%)

 

Lab :

Project1(30%) + Project2(20%) + 2 Quiz (10% each) + Labs (30%)

 

Comments on the Course and Instructor :

The instructor gave more stress on the logic part. The entire labs were in Prolog only. The theory course also covered Prolog. The exams were very numerical. Almost all the questions included heavy calculations. Most of the questions tested our ability to simulate the models / formulae discussed in the class. There were no lecture slides, though relevant wikipedia links were given.

 

Who will find it interested ?

All those who are interested in logic and learning how to model interesting real life systems.