Possibility of a pre-mid-term review session on Monday 16th ~4pm (RSVP)

Folks:

 I am trying to find out if there would be sufficient interest in having a review session before the midterm.

Such a review session might happen on Monday 16th at 4pm, and will be offered by a senior graduate student.

Let me know, by replying to this email,  if you would be interested in attending such a session.

If there is sufficient interest, I will let you know where it will be held.

cheers
Rao

Sample solution code posted on the web for project 1

..in case you want some sort of benchmark to compare your code to..

rao

Solutions to Homework 2 posted on the web page

cheers
rao

Universal grammar

We had a digression yesterday about statistics vs. probability yesterday where I wound up discussing about
learning, bias in learning as well as universal grammar as a basis for language learning.

If you found any of that intriguing, you might like the following post from a previous year that talks about
universal grammars:

http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/f06-cse471-mailarchive/msg00090.html

Rao

Questions on project 2

I have a question about the meaning of the "main diagonal constraint" on project 2.

1. What's the precise meaning of main diagonal? For example, for a 4x4 board:

1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
4 5 6 7
2 3 4 5

is the main diagonal 1 6 6 5 ?

2. Does this apply to each block or to the entire board?

Readings for next class: 13.6; 14.1 and 14.2

Folks

 

 Too many of you seemed dazed and half-or-fully asleep yesterday (it must rank as one of the sleepiest classes I have taught in ages :-(

To make sure this doesn't happen again tomorrow, please read (or at least skim) sections 13.6, 14.1 and 14.2 in the text before coming to class.

regards

rao

Thinking Cap Questions on Propositional & Probabilistic logic

• Sender: subbarao2z2@gmail.com

See if you can answer these on the blog

0.  If I have n propositions, how many possible clauses are there? (Assume that clauses of the form A V A are automatically simplified to A).
     Does this help in convincing you that the resolution theoremproving search procedure is *complete* in that it will terminate whether or not
     the theorem you are trying to prove actually holds?

1. We saw that propositional logic is monotonic and that real world requried "defeasible" or "non-monotonic" reasoning. Is probabilistic reasoning
    monotonic or non-monotonic? Explain.

2. You obviously heard the two words "Probability" and "statistics". What is the difference between them? (or are they basically synonyms?)

3. We made a big point about the need for representing joint distribution compactly. Much of elementary probability/statistics handles
    continuous and multi-valued variables, where specifying the distribution of the single variable itself will need a huge number of numbers.
    How is this normally side-stepped in elementary probability?


Rao