Reading 01: Uninformed Search + Informed Search

Welcome to CSE 30124 Introduction to Artifical Intelligence, which (as the syllabus states) is a broad introduction to the field of artificial intelligence. We will begin the semester with a brief history of the field and review of relevant mathematical concepts that form the foundation of AI. As the semester continues we will dive into Machine and Deep Learning and then at the very end loop back around to where we started.

TL;DR

For this week, you should familiarize yourself with using Slack, setup your GitHub assignments repository, decide how you will run the notebook software used in this course and then submit your first reading quiz.

Course Overview

Artificial Intelligence is an extremely broad field and while no doubt all of you will be familiar with some aspects of it, likely the GPT family, these tools are only a small subset of what the field encompasses as a whole.

We will begin the course at the top of the circle and work our way down. However at the end of the semester and the bottom of the circles we will find that we start to wrap back around again to the top.

Task 1: Slack

For communication outside of our meeting time, we will be using Slack, specifically the #cse-30124-sp26 channel:

https://nd-cse.slack.com/messages/sp26-cse-30124

There is a class mailing list, but most day-to-day communication (including office hours and homework help) should take place on Slack.

Be aware of the following:


Task 2: Canvas Homework Group

All of your assignments (labs and homeworks) will be submitted via Canvas as an html file.

  1. (Optional) Find a partner to work with.
  2. Sign-in to Canvas and navigate to the course page.
  1. Navigate to the People tab, and then the Intro to AI Groups tab.
  1. Join one of the avaible teams with your partner.
  2. Now when you or your partner submit a homework assignment, it will be submitted for both of you!
  3. Optionally: Message the professor or one of your TAs to update your team name!

Task 3: Notebooks

Please at least skim all four, but for the purposes of this course you just need to get one of the methods working to run your notebooks. Notebooks can be run locally through something like VSCode, and this is what I recommend and use. If you have other methods, please feel free to reach out to your me to discuss them.

Task 4: Reading

Syllabus: CSE 30124 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Most weeks you will have a reading assignment followed by a brief quiz that will cover the two upcoming lectures. Each of the two will have a primary reading and then a link to a number of additional resources that I encourage you to explore if you're interested. Once completing the readings, use the link below to access the canvas quiz. Quizzes are due at 3:00 PM on the day of the first lecture for the topic.

Note: We will be a little lenient on this first reading quiz.
Note: Most of the readings are significantly more in depth than what you will need to answer the quizzes. It's completely fine if you skim portions (especially the ones full of equations (yuck)), these are merely meant to prepare you for the lectures so you at least have some familiarity with the material (and they allow me to shift some of the exam points to the quizzes, which are hopefully less stressful).

Topics

Uninformed Search

Readings

Videos

Notebooks

Informed Search

Readings

Videos

Notebooks

Blogposts

Papers

Task 5: Quiz

Please respond to the quiz below. You may edit your responses after each submission, so there's really no reason you shouldn't get full credit on these!

Access the quiz here