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Update to the Project Software

Written on 29.11.23 by Thorsten Klößner

Dear students,

since we have witnessed unintended use of the State interface within some project implementations, we have refined this interface a bit by restricting access to those functions not intended to be used. Please update your project by running git pull --no-edit fork main. The change potentially makes your code no longer compile if you use one of the functions, which is intended because you should not use them and may cause unintended results.

Regards, Thorsten Klößner

Written on 28.11.23 by Thorsten Klößner

Dear students,

the description for project 1 has been released. You can find it in the Materials section. The project will go on for 2 weeks. Please start as early as possible.

Note that the deadline for project 0 is today, 23:59. Make sure that you push your implementation to the main branch of… Read more

Dear students,

the description for project 1 has been released. You can find it in the Materials section. The project will go on for 2 weeks. Please start as early as possible.

Note that the deadline for project 0 is today, 23:59. Make sure that you push your implementation to the main branch of the repository until said deadline. We will not evaluate other revisions.

Regards, Thorsten

Lecture Hall Change on Firday

Written on 27.11.23 by Thorsten Klößner

Dear students,

due to the anniversary event of the Max Planck Institute, the AI lecture this Friday will have to be moved to another lecture hall. The lecture will take place in E1.3 lecture hall H 002 instead. Please make note of this so you do not accidentally end up in an anniversary party.

Regards, Thorsten

AI Project Build Issue Fixes

Written on 23.11.23 by Thorsten Klößner

Dear students,

we fixed some issues reported to us with the project build for Mac users with Apple Silicon processor and an inconvenience appearing for Windows users. Please pull the latest changes by running 'git pull --no-edit fork main', if you belong to the aforementioned groups, otherwise feel… Read more

Dear students,

In particular, the following issues were fixed:

Windows: Incompatibility between build script and VSCode settings. This caused a build triggered by the build button in VSCode to fail after initially building with the build script build.py, and vice versa. After pulling the changes and removing the builds folder, both methods of building the project should now be interchangable.
MacOS with Apple Silicon processor (in particular the M1 series): Errors during linking due to incompatible processor architecture should no longer occur. A workaround was provided in a forum post, but is now no longer needed, everything should work out-of-the-box. If you are affected by this, remove the builds folder and re-build the project after pulling the changes.

Regards, Thorsten Klößner

Tutorial Sheet for Chapter 6 and 7

Written on 20.11.23 by Daniel Fišer

Dear students,

exercise sheets for chapters 6 and 7 are available in CMS. They will be discussed on tutorials next week.

Best,

Dan

Access to your project repository and release of the project description

Written on 17.11.23 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
we will release the setup instruction for the project software after the lecture today in the Materials section. On Tuesday, there will be a short demonstration of the setup, followed by an introduction to the projects. Thorsten will show you how to work on the projects in Visual Studio Code, how to build them, how to test and debug your implementations and give an overview over the software. Please read the description before the demonstration and set up your system following the provided instructions as best as you can. ( The description is neither supposed to be a lot nor supposed to be complicated. Doing this on Monday gives you plenty of time. Enjoy your weekend. :) )

An important note is that we use the Saarland Informatics Campus (SIC) Gitlab to grant you access to the repositories. If you've never used this Gitlab before, please sign in to https://gitlab.cs.uni-saarland.de/ to activate your account. Your username is the beginning of your student email address. For example, if your name is Konrad Klug and you were assigned the email kogl00001@stud.uni-saarland.de, your username is "kogl00001". Your password is the one you've set for your SIC account. If you're unsure or confused, you can visit the password reset page: https://sam.sic.saarland/accounts/password/reset/ A quick note: These services are quite useful. Every student, for instance, can create unlimited repositories on the aforementioned Gitlab or use Nextcloud. More information can be found here: https://sam.sic.saarland/

If you have already logged in once into the Gitlab you should have just received access to your repository. If you did not, access should be granted after a few hours of your initial sign in. This is a scheduled job running on our server. If it does not work immediately, you should stay patient. If after a day you still do not have access, please contact lauer@cs.uni-saarland.de . For further trouble shooting there will be office hours starting next week on Thursday, ofcourse you can also always use the forum and remember to make use of Thorten's demonstration.

In case you are curious, the initial state of your project repository can be found here: https://gitlab.cs.uni-saarland.de/fai-public/teaching/ai/project-skeleton

Good luck with the projects and happy dancing on the weekend. 💃🪩🕺

Tutorial Sheet for Chapter 5

Written on 15.11.23 by Daniel Fišer

Dear students,

I just fixed/clarified the description of the exercise 3 in sheet for chapter 5. Please, download the new version if you were unsure how to interpret ex. 3. This sheet will be discussed in tutorials next week.

Best,

Dan

Tutorial Start

Written on 08.11.23 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
we would like to clarify that tutorials will start next week Monday, November 13th. If you wish to switch your tutorial slot, you have the option to do so by finding a fellow student who is willing to make the switch. Both you and your partner should send send an email to … Read more

For a list of available tutorial slots, please visit the team page at: https://cms.sic.saarland/ai_23/tutors/

Additionally, there is a dedicated forum post where you can find potential partners for tutorial slot exchanges: https://fai-forum.cs.uni-saarland.de/c/artificial-intelligence-winter-2023-2024/tutorial-exchange/69

Tutorial Assignment

Written on 08.11.23 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
the tutorials have been assigned. You can find the details of your tutorial on your personal status page.

Tutorial Sheets for Chapters 3 and 4

Written on 07.11.23 by Daniel Fišer

Dear students,

tutorial sheets for chapters 3 and 4 are now available in CMS. Both of these sheets will be discussed in tutorials next week. The chapter 4 on heuristic search will be finished in Friday's lecture, but the slides for the whole chapter 4 can already be found in CMS. The tutorial slots… Read more

Dear students,

Best,

Dan

Reminder programming demonstrations

Written on 06.11.23 (last change on 06.11.23) by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
this is a quick reminder that the first programming demonstrations session will take place tomorrow. You can find additional details in the calendar entry: https://cms.sic.saarland/ai_23/full_calendar/events/view/42

Tutorial Preference Selection

Written on 02.11.23 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
this is a reminder to choose your tutorial preferences until next Tuesday, November 7th, 23:59. You can make your selections on your personal status page.

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The first lecture will be on October 27th, 14:15 in E2 2 (Günter Hotz lecture Hall). See also the Timetable.

Course description

This course offers an introduction to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Compared to previous iterations, this course is more focused, namely on the theory and practice of sequential decision making where the AI agent needs to decide about actions in a complex environment so as to achieve a long-term objective such as reaching a goal, maximizing expected reward, or winning a game. For example, games like Go and Chess are sequential decision making problems. Thanks to this more specific focus, the re-designed course covers that focus in more depth. In particular, the course now includes aspects of both, symbolic and subsymbolic (aka data-driven) AI, as well as combinations thereof, and therewith provides students with a glimpse of one of the most prominent challenges in AI today -- combining symbolic and subsymbolic AI. A prominent example of an AI system leveraging such a combination is the AlphaGo/Zero system series, which changed the world of computer game-playing, and whose ingredients and architecture we will understand as part of the course.

The course offers a general introduction into the field of AI, its history, key assumptions, paradigms, concepts, and fundamental methods. Students learn to master techniques developed in the fields of search algorithms, classical planning, Markov decision processes, and game playing. The lecture is accompanied by programming projects in which students implement some of the concepts and algorithms encountered in the lecture. With the knowledge acquired in this course, students are knowledgeable in crucial aspects of AI, and are well-prepared for student assistants jobs as well as BSc and MSc theses at FAI and other AI-related research groups in Saarbrücken.

For more information, please check our organization page.

Prerequisites. Solid knowledge in algorithms and data structures is necessary to follow this course. Solid knowledge in imperative programming and basic knowledge about C is also necessary; our programming projects make use of C++ and Python, but we will offer additional help to those not familiar or accustomed to these languages in lecture-like demos. Basic knowledge in machine learning will help, but is not absolutely required; the same goes for basic knowledge in complexity theory.

Note. Students who have passed the Artificial Intelligence course in previous years are not allowed to retake the exam.

The first lecture will primarily address organizational matters. We aim to answer any remaining questions there. If for some reason you cannot wait until then, you may contact one of the teaching assistants directly.