This course follows Norvig and Russell (the authors of our main textbook) in introducing artificial intelligence (AI) through the design and building of intelligent agents, which now routinely turn up in the marketplace. It includes introduction to, and significant development in, Common Lisp (some hands-on programming in theorem provers is provided as well), the programming language traditionally associated with AI in the United States. Please note that Lisp is a ``real-world" language for ``real world" problems and tasks. NASA's ``Deep Space 1" probe, for example, is controlled real time by Lisp, with Earth-based engineers able to bring up down here a Lisp prompt allowing them to control DS1 in space.
This course seeks to explain AI as a set problems, techniques, formalisms, algorithms, and engineering objectives; AI is not the same as, nor is it to be inseparably joined with, any particular programming language. Though Common Lisp is the tradition, in theory any Turing-complete language could be used, and in fact Norvig and Russell do offer sample code, at the web site for their text, in other languages, including Java. In addition, any of the three main programming paradigms -- functional, declarative, procedural (or, as Shapiro, the author of our Lisp textbook, says, ``imperative") -- could be studied to the exclusion of the other two in an introductory AI course. We will touch upon all three. Bringsjord does happen to prefer the declarative paradigm.
Some of the instructor's research in AI will be interjected into the course material.1
For on-site students, class discussion is encouraged; attendance is mandatory.
Bringsjord is the Director of the Minds & Machines Lab at RPI, and elements of this lab, which is devoted to AI and the closely related fields of applied cognitive science and cognitive systems engineering, will be introduced. For example, our coverage of robotics will probably be ``jazzed up" with actual robots from the M&M Lab (and so we may do some light programming in Interactive C).