Introduction to
Artificial Intelligence / CS440
Course Description
cs440 is an introductory course about the field known as
Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is not
only about building an “artificial mind”, a robot or the
world’s best chess playing program. We will learn how to
mathematically model (simple) tasks in real world that deal
with perception and action: how a computer may use video
cameras and gyroscopes to autonomously fly a helicopter,
how to design algorithms that search through the web
looking for pieces of information that exactly answer our
questions, and how to understand those questions in the
first place. To do this we will need to know how to
conveniently (from computational perspective) represent our
knowledge about those tasks, how to infer best actions
(motor torque) based on the perceived state of the world
(helicopter’s camera seems to “see” a tree in front of the
helicopter), and how to systematically learn further facts
about those tasks from the knowledge and percepts.