Fulton course/instructor evaluations

Dear all:

Hope you are starting to have a good break and all your mental bruises are slowly healing.

I just received the results of the  teaching evaluations that you folks filled and enjoyed reading them.

Thanks to all of you who took time to fill the evaluations!

It is my somewhat quixotic custom to allow access to the evaluations to the class students for a limited time. It might give you a feel as to how your individual
views stacked up with the rest of the class (you know--sorrow desires company and all that).

In keeping with it, here are links to the full evaluations--warts and all--in case you are interested:

http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471/cse471-s09-ug.htm   (471 section)

http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471/cse471-s09-g.htm      (598 section)

Regarding the comments about the difficulty level of the course, the following is the link for a comparable course taught by the textbook author http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/classes/cs188/f05/ 

So look at the bright side--you got almost all that, with a lower tuition, fewer projects, easier exams, *and*  a suaver accent! ;-)

cheers
Rao

sayanora...

Folks:

 I agonized for some three days and  just submitted your grades; you should be able to see them on the registrar's site.

 It has been fun teaching you folks; I hope to see some of you in other classes. Feel free to drop by if I can be of any help.

Good luck with your degree programs (or real life, if you were so unlucky as to graduate already :).
Hope you get to recall and use at least some of the things we talked about this semester
down the line somewhere.

cheers
Rao

Go Huygens! A new world record in a difficult game for computers

From the article:

At the Taiwan Open 2009, held in Taiwan from Feb. 10-13, the Dutch national supercomputer Huygens, which is located at SARA Computing and Networking Services in Amsterdam, defeated two human Go professionals in an official match.

Here's more:
http://www.sciencecodex.com/french_software_and_dutch_national_supercomputer_huygens_establish_a_new_world_record_in_go_0

specimen solutions for the final..

In case you are interested, here is a link to specimen solutions for the final (note that these are solutions written by the student
scoring the highest, but not perfect, on the final).

http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471/s09-final-soln.pdf

Rao

Full spreadsheet of the final gradebook

Someone wanted to have one last look at the final grade book I am operating with. Here it is...

Rao

Final cumulatives (with the final exam scores thrown in)

Folks:

 Here are the final cumulatives (with final exam scores thrown in). The highest for final in UG is 102 and in grad is 104 (out of 110).
The averages are 64 and 84 respectively.

The top students in CSE471 and the CSE598 categories are both guaranteed A+ grades (assuming their photo-finish holds up ;-)).
They both are welcome to offer me (non-binding) advice on where to put grade cutoffs for the rest of the class...

As for the rest, they shall find out their letter grades from the registrar come Tuesday.


regards
Rao

a brain aphorism based on the final..

There is a quote I used to like, and it goes like this:
 
 "If our brains are so simple that we can understand them,
    we will be so simple that we can't"

(Of course, I don't believe it, but I like the sound of it ;-)

Anyways, I was thinking about it, as I am grading the final and several of you wrote
"True" for the question which says that an agent has the best chance of success when
all the variables are independent.. yes you can do reasoning fast, but to what end? You
can't change a thing in the world...


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Another short-answer question that only a few people got right is the last one. The point there is that
if you add a random number to the h value, then you are likely to make the h-value of each node unique.
Which means there can be as many distinct f-values as there are nodes.  This is a death-knell of IDA*


Rao