AI Class 6, Midterm Exam...ugh

Actually the Midterm is not so bad really...but maybe I should wait until the scores come out before saying that.

It does get off to a rough start with a couple of true/false philosophy of set theory questions:

• "There exists (at least) one environment in which every agent is rational."
• "For every agent, there exists (at least) one environment in which the agent is rational."

Which seem to be throwing folks into un-bounded loops. It may be that they are actually Logic questions in Agent/Environment clothing. As I noted before, the word "rational" was only used in the summary of what we learned in lesson one and the only way we would have learned its meaning was by inference. Added to this is the fact that the scope of all possible Agents and Environments is not defined anywhere that I can find: Does it include the empty set? If so, what would be considered "Rational" behavior? I guess we'll find out when the Exam is graded.

Otherwise the questions are pretty well specified and -- again modulo my jumping the gun -- don't require a lot of tedious calculation ala Professor Thrun's video pleasures. But let me just say now, "I hate Logic", so that when I fail all 6 sub-parts of Question 12 I can also say, "I told myself so". I tried to use the demo code's DPLLDemo.java to validate my mental gymnastics and got different answers based on the formatting of the questions. So maybe it's even beyond the abilities of the computer to solve -- or else I should start filing bug reports.

At the half-way mark we finally seem to be getting into interesting territory with Markov Models. This is what I tried to do at SFI those many years ago so maybe I'll come to understand what I was on about then. But in general I think I've discovered an unfortunate truth:

...I don't actually like Artificial Intelligence...

The trouble is, so far in this very basic class, AI is being used to find simple -- validated -- solutions to fairly complicated problems, generally using the excruciatingly tedious iterated algorithms for which computers were invented. But what I'm interested in is getting Complex results from Simple systems. And that is my working definition of Complex: it is not Complicated for that very Simple reason.

But I guess it's a good thing to torture myself with the Complicated for a while so I know what I'm not missing....