CS 289, Fall 2004, Stuart Russell
Weekly Questions for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning



Weeks 1 and 2 (due 9/8): AI, knowledge-based systems, propositional logic

  1. In the commentary on McCarthy's "Programs with Common Sense", what is Bar-Hillel's main criticism of McCarthy's proposal? In retrospect, was it valid?
  2. What major element is missing from McCarthy's deductive formulation of planning?
  3. Do Exercises 7.4(c) and (e) from AIMA2e.
  4. Briefly explain the key elements that make CHAFF efficient.
  5. Do you think Schöning's algorithm is likely to be more or less efficient than WalkSAT in practice?

Week 3 (due 9/13): QBFs, propositional agents.

  1. Explain very roughly how a chess problem such as "Can White mate in two?" corresponds to a QBF. (You need not say exactly what all the propositional variables are.) What about Kriegspiel, where the black pieces are invisible?
  2. Do Exercise 7.13(a) and (b) from AIMA2e.
  3. According to Rosenschein and Kaelbling, what is the role of knowledge representation and reasoning in intelligent agents? Could an R-K agent use explicitly represented knowledge, and, if so, how?

Week 4 (due 9/20): First-order logic: representation

  1. Do AIMA2e Ex. 8.9, and include a formal proof of the answer to the question.
  2. Do AIMA2e Ex. 9.1.
  3. Explain why first-order logic might be preferable to propositional logic for knowledge representation.

Week 6 (due 10/4): First-order logic: inference

  1. Do AIMA2e Ex. 9.8.
  2. Do AIMA2e Ex. 9.20.
  3. Explain why PTTP is (a) complete and (b) fairly efficient.

Week 7 (due 10/11): Reasoning about action

  1. Do AIMA2e Ex. 10.3.
  2. Do AIMA2e Ex. 11.15.
  3. Do AIMA2e Ex. 11.17.

Week 8 (due 10/18): Reasoning about action contd.; general ontology.

  1. Do AIMA2e Ex. 12.17.
  2. What do Bertoli et al. use OBDDS for and why?
  3. Do AIMA2e Ex. 10.10.

Week 9 (due 10/25): General ontologies contd.; reasoning about knowledge and communication.

No questions for this week.

Week 10 (due 11/5): Bayesian networks: representation and inference.

  1. Do AIMA2e Ex. 14.8.
  2. Do AIMA2e Ex. 14.9.
  3. (optional) It may be helpful to get some extra practice by doing Exs. 14.5 and 14.10 also.

Week 11 (due 11/8): Bayesian networks contd.

No questions for this week.

Week 12 (due 11/15): Qualitative probabilistic networks; temporal probability models.

  1. Explain how a QPN decision model could be used for reasoning by analogy, i.e., appealing to a past decided case to obtain a decision on a new case.
  2. Do AIMA2e Ex. 15.2.
  3. Do AIMA2e Ex. 15.3.
  4. Do AIMA2e Ex. 15.9.

Week 13 (due 11/22): Temporal probability models contd: activity monitoring and robotics.

Week 14 (due 11/29): First-order probabilistic languages

Week 15 (due 12/6): First-order probabilistic languages contd.