AI Planning Prof. Dr. Jörg Hoffmann Advanced Lecture (9 CP), Winter Semester 2020

Here are some facts about the exam and the exam relevant content.
We also uploaded some old exercises you can use to practice for the exam.
Keep in mind that there might be some exercises for topics that were not discussed this year, and we can not guarantee that all the solutions are correct.

 

Exam facts:

• The exam will be about applying the algorithms/results from the course to example planning tasks.

• Ultimate reference are the post-handouts.

• ANY slides/books/papers allowed.

• NO laptops or mobile phones in exam! Pocket calculators won’t be needed.

• The exam will be 120 minutes, starting from the moment we allow you to look at the exercises.

• If we start a bit late, we end a bit late.

• You don’t have to bring your own paper.

 

 

Exam-Relevant Contents:

Here’s what is NOT relevant to the exam:

• Chapters 1, 3, 4, 17

• Chapter 2 Section “Extended Planning Frameworks”.

• Chapter 8 Section “Graphplan Representation”.

• Chapter 14 Section “ps. Landmarks and Hitting Sets”.

• Chapter 15 Section “A Walk Through the Zoo”.

• Chapter 16 Section “Automatic Surface Analysis”.

 

Everything else is relevant.

 

Best,
Rebecca

Dear students,

points for all your submitted projects should be in CMS. As for the grading scheme: 1 point was subtracted for every 2 less solved problems in comparison to the reference solution (in cases no reference was available, the best solution was taken as the reference). All submissions with a segmentation fault were graded with zero points. If I found a more serious problem, less points were assigned and I wrote you an email describing where the problem was. As always, if you think you deserve more (or less) points than assigned, or if you want to discuss anything related to your projects, then either come discuss it with me during office hours, or write me an email at danfis@cs.uni-saarland.de.

Best,

   Dan Fiser

Dear students,

this is to update you regarding this question, which you are certainly wondering about.

As of now, the official university regulation is that exams will take place as planned (under Corona hygiene and distancing rules of course; you will receive details regarding those later).

The alternative would be to postpone the 1st exam. This is not possible however within the upcoming term break, as March/April is already booked for all the 2nd exams. So one of the two exams would have to be in fall. This would cause serious issues both for the faculty (finding space and time within the summer term break) and the students (having to re-prepare for a course taken 6 months ago).

So we will proceed as planned.

If you cannot attend the 1st exam for good reasons (abroad and unable to travel/quarantined/acute symptoms) then we will offer you an oral exam. In this case, please write an email to Rebecca Eifler eifler@cs.uni-saarland.de

best regards, and good luck with the upcoming exams under these unfortunate circumstances,

Jörg Hoffmann

 

Dear Students,

This is a reminder that, in order to take the Planning exam you must register in two different places, until one week before the exam at the latest: February 5.

1) CMS: We have opened the registration in CMS. You'll be able to register as soon as you fulfill the requirements (50 points in programming projects). Of course, we'll try to upload the points as soon as possible so that you can do this early.

2) HISPOS/VIPA: This depends on your course of studies and I don't have the list, but you should know if your course of studies is using one of these. If so, you need to register in the corresponding system. Students in course of studies that belong to HISPOS or VIPA and don't register there will not be allowed to take the exam. If you cannot register in HISPOS or VIPA, please write Rebecca (eifler@cs.uni-saarland.de) once you register in CMS so that we keep track of the list of students that attend the exam without being in HISPOS or VIPA.
For more Information please check this news (18.11.20)

The exam is on the 12. February in HS002 in E1.3. at 10:00.
We will publish further information about the exam with respect to corona rules next week.

Best regards,
Rebecca

Dear students,

your points should be in CMS. As always, check we didn't make any mistake, and let us know if you want to discuss anything either during office hours or via danfis@cs.uni-saarland.de.

When grading the ff heuristic, we subtracted 1 point for every two problems not solved by your solution, but solved by the reference. All successful submissions for h^2 got full points.

Best

   Dan Fiser

Dear students,

your points for the second project should be in CMS, please check that we didn't make any mistake, and let us know (at danfis@cs.uni-saarland.de) if we did.

When grading your submissions, we (i) subtracted one point for every problem that was solved by the reference solver, but not yours; (ii) subtracted couple points for small bugs; (iii) assigned zero points for completely incorrect solution; (iv) added 10 points for the "counter-based" implementation.

If you want to discuss your solution or grading, then come to the office hours (or let us know via email).

Best

   Dan Fiser

Dear students,

We have extended the deadline to team up for the projects till Friday (December 11th).

If you want to form a group, add the other group members to one of your repositories, and send a mail to Daniel Fišer (danfis@cs.uni-saarland.de) with the link to the repository you want to use and the list of group members. We highly encourage you to do so, as the remaining projects will be more difficult and complex than the first ones. Feel free to use the forum if you are still looking for team members.

Best,
Daniel Höller

This is a reminder that the deadline to team up for the projects is coming up tonight. If you want to form a group, add the other group members to one of your repositories, and send a mail to Daniel Fišer (danfis@cs.uni-saarland.de) with the link to the repository you want to use and the list of group members. We highly encourage you to do so, as the remaining projects will be more difficult and complex than the first ones. Feel free to use the forum if you are still looking for team members.

Dear students,
some of you had a problem running the Fast Downward planner with python >=3.8.
We fixed this issue in the base repository. So, you can merge the fix using git:

  git remote add base git@gitlab.cs.uni-saarland.de:ai-planning-20-21/fast-downward.git
  git remote update
  git merge base/master

If you didn't have this problem, you don't need to merge.

Best regards,
   Dan Fiser

Dear students,

Please carefully read the following information from Evelyn Kraska.

All the best,
Daniel

 

Dear Lecturers of the winter semester 2020/21,

All students are  asked to register for the exams for the winter semester 2020/21. Exam registration or a withdrawal is possible until one week before the main exam or the re-exam. A subsequent exam registration by the study coordination is only possible in justified exceptions.
*
*Registration for exams is possible from approx. beginning of December

*Seminars:*
For (pro)seminars, registration or cancellation is possible up to three weeks after the topic assignment or kick-off meeting.

Please remind your students of the exam registration.

In case of problems wih the exam registration the students (Informatik, Medieninformatik, CuK, Visual Computing, Cybersicherheit, DSAI, Promotion vorb.)  should contact:
studium@cs.uni-saarland.de

Other students have to contact their examination office.

These students are *not* able to register in HISPOS:

Wirtschaftsinformatiker (Business Informatics)
Erasmusstudents
guest students
Bachelor/Master DSAI (not at the moment)

to some extent students from other course of studies

*Currently the following students cannot register in HISPOS:*

Bachelor of Computer Science, StO 2020
Bachelor Cyber Security, StO 2020
Bachelor Media Informatics, StO 2020
Bachelor Mathematics and Computer Science, StO 2020
Teacher of computer science, StO 2020

Master Media Informatics, StO 2020
Master Visual Computing, StO 2020

Please let us know the participants of the (pro)seminars of the above mentioned study programs after the end of the course. We will register them in HISPOS as soon as it is possible.

Unfortunately, we do not yet know whether it will be possible to register for exams at the beginning of the exam period. Further information will follow in January.

Thank you.

Best regards,
Evelyn Kraska

Hi all,

just FYI in case it's not clear: (I saw someone in Gather just now who seemed to want to talk to me but then disappeared)

• I'll be on the stage in the "Lecture Hall" after each lecture.
• You can actually navigate to any Gather participant by clicking on his/her name on the top right and choosing "locate". This will show you a shortest path to that person.
• There is no need to come on the stage to talk to me; it is enough to stand within a small radius.
• Chrome generally works best for Gather.

best,

Jörg

 

The programming projects overview is now online (see course material). In this sheet, you will find all the organizational details regarding the projects (repository setup, nightly tests, grading), as well as a short description for each individual subproject and their dependencies.

There will be a programming workshop on Thursday November 12th at 2:15pm (see organization page). In the workshop, we will give you a brief overview of the projects you can choose to implement. We will also give you an introduction to the Fast Downward framework with some live coding to prepare you for the projects (in fact, you might already be able to finish the first project in the workshop). Before the workshop, you should have read the projects overview, and have set up your repository so you can follow the live coding in the workshop.

Please use the forums for general questions about the projects. If you have specific questions about your code, you can come to gather.town during the office hours (Thursdays 10am, see organization page) or send a mail to Dan Fišer (danfis@cs.uni-saarland.de).

Dear students,

we have, after all, decided to provide a central Gather space for the course:

https://gather.town/app/xzOEC0RRMfqoXtGV/FAI

This space serves for the following functionalities:

1. Lectures, tutorials, and introductory programming workshop wil be in the "Lecture Hall" in the Gather space. Entering that space and pressing 'x' will transfer you to zoom.
2. The weekly office hours will take place directly in the Gather space, so that students can form groups and tutors can "walk around between" these groups.
3. The lecturers will be in Gather after the lectures, so you can walk up to them and ask any additional questions you might have.
4. You may use this space as an online meeting space for students. The Gather space will be always open, and it provides ample space for individual meetings and discussions.

Points 2. and 3. are the reasons for designing the Gather space despite your majority "I don't care" vote in the first lecture. Office hours are more naturally supported in such a space, and the same is true for questions to us after the lecture (of which there were quite a few already). That said, you can still access lectures directly, via the same zoom link as before.

Hope you enjoy the course!

best regards,

Jörg Hoffmann