News

Re-Exam Inspection

Written on 21.03.24 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
we moved the re-exam inspection to another time slot, due to a collision with another exam. It will be on Monday, March 25 from 13:00-14:30 in seminar room 3.06 E1 1.

Re-Exam Results and Inspection

Written on 20.03.24 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
the re-exams are graded and the results are now visible on your personal status page. The exam inspection will be next week on Monday, March 25 from 10:00-11:30 in seminar room 3.06 E1 1.

Re-Exam Registration & Main Exam Results

Written on 07.03.24 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
your updated main exam grades are now visible in CMS and should be visible in LSF around noon tomorrow. Note that your points my also have increased if you were not in the inspection as we corrected a grading error in exercise 2 (d). From there you can register for the re-exam.… Read more

Dear students,
your updated main exam grades are now visible in CMS and should be visible in LSF around noon tomorrow. Note that your points my also have increased if you were not in the inspection as we corrected a grading error in exercise 2 (d). From there you can register for the re-exam. Please:

  1. Register in LSF by 11.03.2024 23:59.
  2. Register in CMS by 14.03.2024 23:59.

The re-exam will be on 19.03.2024 and have the same mode as the main exam: Please be in front of the Günter-Hotz lecture hall at 13:45. We plan to start the exam punctual at 14:00. The exam will last two hours. You may bring a non-programmable calculator, but we do not expect it to provide any advantage, as all calculations should be simple. As a reminder: The exam will be open-book, meaning you can bring any supplementary materials on paper that you'd like.

Main Exam Results and Exam Inspection

Written on 29.02.24 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
the exams are graded and the results are now visible on your personal status page. The exam inspection will be next week on Thu, March 7 from 10:30-12:00 in lecture hall 002, E1 3. 

Main Exam

Written on 26.02.24 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
if you are taking the main exam, please be in front of the Günter-Hotz lecture hall tomorrow at 13:45. We plan to start the exam punctual at 14:00. The exam will last two hours.

You also may bring a non-programmable calculator, but we do not expect it to provide any advantage, as… Read more

Dear students,
if you are taking the main exam, please be in front of the Günter-Hotz lecture hall tomorrow at 13:45. We plan to start the exam punctual at 14:00. The exam will last two hours.

You also may bring a non-programmable calculator, but we do not expect it to provide any advantage, as all calculations should be simple. As a reminder: The exam will be open-book, meaning you can bring any supplementary materials on paper that you'd like.

One more extra office hours before the first exam

Written on 23.02.24 by Daniel Fišer

Dear students,

there will be one additional extra office hours before the first exam on Monday February 26 from 12:00 to 14:00 where you can come and ask questions.

Best,

   Dan

Project results and Exam registration.

Written on 09.02.24 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
by now, you should have received the results for projects 1-3. Today, an incident occurred where the HFF Bonus mail was mistakenly sent out again. Please disregard this email. If you encounter any other issues, please contact Pascal Lauer via email.

The exam registration is now… Read more

Dear students,
by now, you should have received the results for projects 1-3. Today, an incident occurred where the HFF Bonus mail was mistakenly sent out again. Please disregard this email. If you encounter any other issues, please contact Pascal Lauer via email.

The exam registration is now open. If you wish to participate in the main exam, please follow these steps:

  1. Register in LSF by February 20, 2024, 23:59.
  2. Register in CMS by February 22, 2024, 23:59.

Please note that you need to have accumulated 30 points in the projects to register in CMS. If you are still short of points for registration and your current daily tests suggest that you will receive them for project 4, you can contact Pascal Lauer via email to register manually. Please be aware that we can only add these points to CMS only after the deadline on Tuesday.

Extra office hour before the first exam

Written on 09.02.24 by Daniel Fišer

Dear students,

we decided to add an extra office hour before the first exam where you can come and ask questions about anything that is not clear to you.

The office hour will take place on 23th of February from 12:00 to 14:00.

Best,

   Dan

HMax/HFF results

Written on 06.02.24 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
the results for the HMax/HFF project are now public. Please note that we evaluated your project separately for each subtask (HMax and HFF) as they had separate (extended) deadlines. So you will receive two emails, one for each evaluation.

If you encounter any problems regarding the… Read more

Dear students,
the results for the HMax/HFF project are now public. Please note that we evaluated your project separately for each subtask (HMax and HFF) as they had separate (extended) deadlines. So you will receive two emails, one for each evaluation.

If you encounter any problems regarding the final evaluation, please contact Pascal Lauer via email.

Lecture Friday Feb 2: online

Written on 01.02.24 by Joerg Hoffmann

Hi all,

it's a pity, but given the bus drivers' strike tomorrow, presumably many of you will not be able to come to the uni campus.

So the lecture tomorrow will be online. Same link as before: https://cs-uni-saarland-de.zoom.us/j/98696736217

best,

Jörg Hoffmann

Goal Count Results

Written on 30.01.24 by Pascal Lauer

Dear students,
the results for the BlindHeuristic/GoalCount project are now public. We will proceed with a final test run for the other projects. You can expect the results of the HMax Project by the end of the week, followed by the evaluation of the subsequent project(s).

Please note that we… Read more

Dear students,
the results for the BlindHeuristic/GoalCount project are now public. We will proceed with a final test run for the other projects. You can expect the results of the HMax Project by the end of the week, followed by the evaluation of the subsequent project(s).

Please note that we encountered issues with sending emails to external servers and thus all emails will now be sent to your student mail. If you encounter any problems with the evaluation results or nightly tests, please contact Pascal Lauer via email.

Small revisions to LAO* and the epsilon-greedy policy

Written on 29.01.24 by Joerg Hoffmann

Hi all,

this is just to draw your attention to small changes in the LAO* pseudo-code (Chapter 14) and the epsilon-greedy policy (Chapter 16):

  • The LAO* pseudo-code previously allowed re-insertion of already expanded states into Frontier, which is wrong.
  • The epsilon-greedy policy did not… Read more

Hi all,

this is just to draw your attention to small changes in the LAO* pseudo-code (Chapter 14) and the epsilon-greedy policy (Chapter 16):

  • The LAO* pseudo-code previously allowed re-insertion of already expanded states into Frontier, which is wrong.
  • The epsilon-greedy policy did not correctly handle the case where there is only one applicable action; also, in the random-exploration case, all actions are considered including the one taken by the policy.

Sorry for this inconvenience. I thought it better to correct these definitions posthoc, after the lectures, than to leave the bugs in.

best,

Jörg Hoffmann

Lecture Friday Jan 26 interrupted

Written on 26.01.24 by Joerg Hoffmann

Hi all,

my sincere apologies that the online lecture today was abruptly interrupted at the end.

The laptop battery was empty -- even though it was plugged in and showing me the "being loaded" symbol. No idea what went wrong; never happened before, 10min later everything works correctly… Read more

Hi all,

my sincere apologies that the online lecture today was abruptly interrupted at the end.

The laptop battery was empty -- even though it was plugged in and showing me the "being loaded" symbol. No idea what went wrong; never happened before, 10min later everything works correctly again.

What got cut off is only the MCTS example run for slide 44. I have uploaded a PDF showing that example run.

Sorry again,

best,

Jörg Hoffmann

Broken Assertion fix in Project 4

Written on 24.01.24 by Thorsten Klößner

Dear students,

quick update regarding project 4: There was a broken assertion that caused the public tests for QVFApproximatorNetwork to fail. The assertion is now fixed, so please pull from the fork repository.

Regards, Thorsten

Release of Final Project

Written on 23.01.24 by Thorsten Klößner

Dear students,

please note that the final project has been released today and the description can be found in the Materials section. The project is once again written in C++ and implementing it is similar to projects 0-2. The deadline for the final project is February 13th.

Regards, Thorsten Klößner

Lecture Friday Jan 26: also online only

Written on 23.01.24 by Joerg Hoffmann

Hi all,

thanks to the train driver strike, sorry but the lecture this Friday will also be online only.

Same zoom link: https://cs-uni-saarland-de.zoom.us/j/98696736217

Apologies. Next week I will definitely be back in Saarbrücken and the lectures will continue in-person.

best,

Jörg Hoffmann

Lecture Tuesday Jan 23: online only

Written on 21.01.24 by Joerg Hoffmann

Hi all,

I need to take care of relatives in Bavaria for a few days next week (father in law is very sick).

Hence the lecture next Tuesday, Jan 23, will be online only.

In zoom: https://cs-uni-saarland-de.zoom.us/j/98696736217

You'll be invited to ask questions (and give answers to my… Read more

Hi all,

I need to take care of relatives in Bavaria for a few days next week (father in law is very sick).

Hence the lecture next Tuesday, Jan 23, will be online only.

In zoom: https://cs-uni-saarland-de.zoom.us/j/98696736217

You'll be invited to ask questions (and give answers to my questions) in the zoom chat.

My apologies for any inconveniences caused. The lecture next Friday will again be in GHH as usual.

best,

Jörg Hoffmann

 

 

Project 3 Update

Written on 15.01.24 by Thorsten Klößner

Dear students,

we received numerous complaints about missing accuracy reports for your models in the daily tests. This was unintentional and is now fixed. The next daily test run will happen unconditionally, whether you pushed a change or not, and will include one log per task in which the best of… Read more

Dear students,

we received numerous complaints about missing accuracy reports for your models in the daily tests. This was unintentional and is now fixed. The next daily test run will happen unconditionally, whether you pushed a change or not, and will include one log per task in which the best of your models and its accuracy on the test data will be reported (even if the test is passed). For the next project, we also hope to include some error logs for failing tests which should make it easier for you to find the source of the bugs.

Furthermore, a section regarding reproducibility has been added to the project description (section 4.1). To ensure that the submitted models are indeed yours, we must be able to generate them using the provided generation script. Please make sure that once the project deadline approaches, all your models can be deterministically generated from scratch by calling this script.

Lastly, a subtle but important detail was added regarding the softmax layer that you must append to your final model. Please choose dim = -1 for the softmax layer, which chooses the last dimension as the reference dimension for softmax. This allows us to evaluate your model for both single states and batches of states.

Due to the issues and changes above, we decided to extend the deadline of the project by three additional days, i.e., until January 26th.

Regards, Thorsten

Course Evaluation

Written on 11.01.24 by Joerg Hoffmann

Hi all,

the course evaluation forms are now available:

Lecture: https://qualis.uni-saarland.de/eva/?l=146425&p=r9bwyp

Tutorials: https://qualis.uni-saarland.de/eva/?l=1464251&p=b6jv6b

best,

Jörg

Release of Project 3

Written on 10.01.24 by Thorsten Klößner

Dear students,

quick note that project 3 was published and the daily tests are running. There was a small mistake in the read_samples function in the initial version as published in the fork repository, which is now fixed. If you have pulled already, please do so once again.

Regards, Thorsten Klößner

Extension of Project 1 Deadline

Written on 12.12.23 by Thorsten Klößner

Dear students,

it was brought to our attention that there is an inconsistency between the project specification for hFF and the tests. Specifically, it it checked in your tests whether your delete-relaxed plan applies extra operators after already reaching the goal state, rejecting in this case.… Read more

Dear students,

it was brought to our attention that there is an inconsistency between the project specification for hFF and the tests. Specifically, it it checked in your tests whether your delete-relaxed plan applies extra operators after already reaching the goal state, rejecting in this case. The project description did however not mention this as a requirement for the returned plan. With pathological tiebreaking between best supporters and chosen actions during plan extraction, it is in general possible to violate this constraint and still be consistent with the specification.

We have now fixed this issue so that the check matches the specification. This affects the public tests as well, so please merge with the fork repository by running git pull fork main. We are sorry if we wasted your time by forcing you to fix an implementation that should have already worked according to the specification.

Additionally, we received some reports by students that received daily test emails inconsistently. To rule out any disadvantages that may result from this and the previously mentioned testing issue, we decided to extend the deadline for hmax until Friday, December 15th, and the deadline for hFF until Tuesday, December 19th. Note that if your implementation already passes all tests, there is nothing left to do for you.

Regards, Thorsten Klößner

Project Announcements

Written on 11.12.23 (last change on 11.12.23) by Thorsten Klößner

Dear students,

we have three announcements to make regarding the projects.

Disabled Daily Tests in Project 1

We received numerous reports targetting three particular daily tests in project 1 in which operators with an empty precondition occur. While the relevant algorithms shown in the… Read more

Dear students,

we have three announcements to make regarding the projects.

Disabled Daily Tests in Project 1

We received numerous reports targetting three particular daily tests in project 1 in which operators with an empty precondition occur. While the relevant algorithms shown in the lecture technically work properly in presence of empty preconditions, their handling is very subtle. Because of this subtely, and especially because there are no public tests covering this edge case, we decided to disable these daily tests and convert to (secret) bonus tests instead, each worth 1 bonus point if passed (you still need to pass the public tests). The following daily tests are affected:

HMaxDailyTest.HeuristicEvalTest.check_heuristic_estimate.2
HMaxDailyTest.SearchTest.test_astar_statistics.2
HFFDailyTest.RelaxedSolvableTest.check_relaxed_plan_and_estimate.0

 

Deadline Extension for Project 2

Secondly, we decided to extend the deadline for project 2 from December 22nd to January 9th. This means that the deadline for project 2 will coincide with the beginning of project 3.

 

CMS Results for Project 0 and following

Entering the points for the projects into the CMS will unfortunately still take some time and we should be able to do so in the next couple of weeks. However, you can refer to the final daily test email you received for the project to calculate the amount of points you will be awarded yourself. To remind you, if a project task has X points and you pass Y% of all daily tests for this task, then will you obtain X * Y% points for this task, under the condition that you pass all public tests for the respective task.

 

Regards, Thorsten Klößner

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… Read more

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,

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 free to skip this.

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… Read more

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

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 lauer@cs.uni-saarland.de to initiate the process.

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,

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 will be published tomorrow as you have still time to set your preferences until midnight.

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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