CS63 Artificial Intelligence


Week 2: Journal Questions

Answer the following questions for Monday's reading:

  1. Give an example from your own problem-solving experience where you've applied abstraction. What detail(s) did you abstract? What detail(s) were critical to preserve?
  2. How would you begin to explain the concepts of the frontier and expanding a node to a friend at the College who is not a computer scientist?

Answer the following questions for Wednesday's reading:

  1. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain an example of a problem from your own experience where a large branching factor prevented you from finding a good solution efficiently.
  2. Russell and Norvig state: "In general, iterative deepening is the preferred uninformed search method when the search space is larger than can fit in memory and the depth of the solution is not known" (p. 82). Identify the sentence from the reading that you believe best supports this claim. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain your choice.
  3. Select the sentence or short passage (no more than three sentences, please) that you find most interesting or provocative. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain why you selected this particular sentence or short passage.

Answer the following questions for Fridays's reading:

  1. Pages 86-88 give arguments for the optimality of A* under two heuristic conditions: admissibility and consistency. State which argument or condition you find more intuitive and/or convincing. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain your choice. (Be sure to relate aspects of both in your explanation).
  2. Of those suggested in the text, identify the technique for creating heuristics that you would likely try first on a new problem. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain your choice.
  3. Identify the sentence, section, or concept from today's reading that remains the most confusing to you. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain what you find confusing about it.