Course Description
CSE 415: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence The University of Washington, Seattle, Spring 2016
Artificial intelligence is a broad field encompassing computational models of human cognition, formal systems for representing and processing symbolic information, expert systems technology, and a variety of techniques for learning, understanding signals, and solving problems.   This course begins with a discussion of what "artificial intelligence" means and how it can be useful. Then we explore the Python programming language and how it can be used to represent and process symbolic information. That's followed by an in-depth treatment of state-space search and problem formulation and solving. We introduce knowledge representation, with a focus on logic and the resolution principle. After that, we focus primarily on machine learning, starting with methods for reasoning under uncertainty. We cover learning of decision trees from examples, reinforcement learning in Markov Decision Processes, and perceptron learning. We touch briefly on natural language understanding, and the future of AI.   The teaching methodology combines lectures, in-class and out-of-class exercises, and programming projects.