Thank god it has come to a close. I put my answers in and checked them twice hoping that Santa will be nice. (No you don't get to see them until the window closes -- extended by another day which I am going to ignore.) Since I have put it all behind me, I figure now is the time to complete my whining ...
There are 59 little boxes to be filled in correctly or not, and as I might have expected 16 of those involve using the hated IMPLIES (=>) logical operator -- who's only use I have been able to ferret out is to be able to tell someone he is a liar once you've discovered that fact ( T !=> F). But thanks to a friendly co-student who pointed out the logical equivalents table on page 249 of the (mostly irrelevant to the course) textbook, I now have no fear of the Implications.
As usual there are a couple of just impenetrable questions for which no clarifications seem to be forthcoming. The most amusing of these is on Planning (at this juncture I should mention that I also hate Planning and Scheduling because it brings back PTSD memories of being repeatedly forced to Plan and Schedule un-plan-able R&D tasks in one of my former lives) where we are given a list of Actions with Preconditions and suchlike and a list of possible Resources that we might have at our disposal, then asked which Resource sets will satisfy the Plan. However the voice-over description of the problem seems to interpret one specific Precondition in two ways, either needing exactly X of something or needing at least Y of something else. The amusing part is that all this formal Planning and Scheduling (crap, not to be pejorative or anything) is supposed to remove the ambiguities from the process.
And five (5) more questions about basic geometric optics and cameras -- if you didn't understand it in high-school physics you are not going to get it now -- so I guess they are there to boost the test scores. So I guess I'll probably mis-copy some answer again and fail them.
On the plus side, the first question is about the Tower of Hanoi puzzle which my grandfather made for me and I solved when I was about 10, and only one of those little boxes reeks of ambiguity so I should have a couple of gimme points there.
So...post game... I was barely inspired by this class and that mostly by accident. As one of my friends who was auditing it said, it's more of a "Oh, so that's how they do that..." set of disconnected topics than a coherent presentation. This may be necessary in an introductory class, especially one meant to be technical rather than a survey. But it leaves me feeling that I now know a smattering of Artificial Intelligence with an emphasis similar to that of Artificial Ingredients rather than anything about Intelligent Behavior.
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