WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE
Computer Science Department

CS4341 ❏ Artificial Intelligence ❏ A'06

Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri - noon - AK 233
Prof. David C. Brown, Fuller Lab 131, (508) 831-5618, dcb at cs.wpi.edu

PROJECTS

There are three projects. They will all be described separately in detail in webbed handouts. The due dates are given in the Schedule. Brief project descriptions are given below. As is appropriate for a 4000-level class, the projects will probably not be completely described by the handouts. You will probably need more information. Some from the book; some from me in class and office hours. You'll need to invent the rest. Start designing the project immediately you get the project description, otherwise you'll be up all night the day before it's due, and I'll say "I told you so", and you'll say "&*^%$#* &^%$", and we'll both get annoyed.

Project 1 - A Rule Interpreter
(Takes about 3 weeks)

Write a program, a Rule Interpreter (RI), that will take a set of Situation-Action rules and will apply them to a set of facts. This is a simple general-purpose problem-solving system.

Project 2 - An Intelligent System
(Takes about 1 week)

Write an intelligent system (IS), using rules and the RI, to do some basic intelligent task in some domain of your choosing. Sample tasks might be Design, Diagnosis, or Criticism, for example. The "domain" might be Bicycles. So, some domain/task combinations might be Bicycle Design, or Bicycle Diagnosis.

Project 3 - A Genetic Algorithm Learning System
(Takes about 3 weeks)

Write a Genetic Algorithm (GA) learning system that will take a set of rules as input and will improve them. That is, the set of rules that result from GA processing should produce "better" results than the original set. This requires some procedure for evaluating the quality of the result produced by a set of rules. This evaluation procedure is used to help guide the learning, causing rules which help to produce better results to be favored. You will demonstrate that the GA works by improving a set of rules for a particular problem. We will give you the details of the problem.