Organization
The course consists of oral lectures accompanied by programming exercises. Successful participation in the course yields 6 ECTS.
The course has one weekly lecture slot of 90 minutes, and one slot with a lecture/tutorial every second week. These will be Tuesdays 12:15 – 13:45, and Wednesdays 10:15 – 11:45. Some slots are used for tutorials on paper exercises (please see the calendar for details). The programming exercises will be supported with an introductory programming workshop and office hours. All teaching will be done in English.
The lectures will be given by Daniel Fišer and Daniel Höller.
Exercises and ECTS. The course will be accompanied by two kinds of exercises, paper exercises and programming exercises. The programming exercises are split into two parts. For the first part, you have to solve two projects individually. For the remaining projects, you are allowed to form groups of up to three students. To qualify for the exam, you need to obtain 50% from the individual programming exercises as well as 50 points from the programming exercises overall. (If you want to participate in future editions of this course, then you need to qualify anew; see also below.)
The paper exercises will involve applying the introduced concepts and algorithms to examples, and leading simple proofs. The paper exercise sheets will be handed out roughly in a biweekly cycle, i.e., in 2-week intervals. While the paper exercises are not mandatory to pass the course, they feature exercises similar to those in the exam so we highly recommend you try to solve them before the corresponding tutorials.
The solutions to paper exercises will be discussed during tutorials. The first two tutorials will in person. The tutorials 3, 4, and 5 will be online via Zoom: https://cs-uni-saarland-de.zoom.us/j/83013207214?pwd=THp1UDdXK3pMSzJiaEpXc2U5WFRUZz09
The programming exercises will involve implementing some of the techniques discussed, starting from a code base (essentially the Fast Downward planning system, FD, implemented in C++) we will provide. In other words, you will build your own planning system as part of the course! We'll run a competition among these systems at the end of term, and good performance in the programming can help you in getting a good exam grade (see below).
Furthermore, in the programming exercises, you will be given the choice of which techniques to implement: Instead of fixed programming tasks on regular sheets, you will obtain a list of programming options up front. Each "option" here is one technique from the course, along with: the number of points obtained by implementing that technique; the time point in the course at which the technique will be explained; the dependencies with other options; and the deadline for submitting your solution if you choose to implement the option.
To get you started on the FD code base, there will be an introductory programming workshop. After that, there will be an office hour offering help with the programming.
A tip: To get started on the planning modeling language PDDL, a good idea may be to have a look at this archive with example files, or import some benchmarks in the planning.domains editor.
Exam and final grade. There will be a written exam at the end of the course. The final grade will be determined based on the performance in that exam, and the performance in the exercises.
For admission to the exam, you need to get at least 50% from the individual programming exercises as well as 35 points from the programming exercises overall.
The final grade will be determined based on a combination of your performance in the programming exercises and exam. Precisely, let N be your number of points in the exam itself, and M be your number of points in the programming exercises. To pass the exam, N>=35 is required. Your grade will be determined from max(N, 0.5*N + 0.5*min(M,80)). In other words, your grade results from either your exam performance, or from a weighted sum over exam and programming exercises (the latter being reduced to 80 points in case you got more than 80 points in those exercises).
Depending on the outcome of the 1st exam, there may be a 2nd exam end of March/beginning of April. If so, then, in compliance with the study regulations each of the two exams will count as a separate attempt to pass the course. In particular, the grading rule for each exam (separately) will be as just explained.
ATTENTION! The re-exam is your only chance to improve your grade.
- By the study regulations, if you do not pass this edition of the course (if you fail, or are absent, in both the exam and the re-exam), then you can participate in future editions of the course as additional attempts to pass the course. (In this case, you need to qualify anew for the exam of that edition of the course.)
- If you do pass this edition of the course, then you cannot improve your grade anymore. The only exception to the latter is if you already pass the exam: in that case, you can try to improve your grade in the re-exam.
Course Material. Due to the recency of the material covered, there exists no text book for this course. There are two kinds of slides, pre-handouts and post-handouts. Pre-handouts do not contain the answers to questions asked during the lecture sessions, and do not contain the details for examples worked during the lecture sessions. The post-handouts do contain all this, and correct any bugs. The pre-handouts are made available one day before the lecture sessions on each chapter, the post-handouts are made available directly after the lecture sessions on a chapter are finished.