AI1

I had a great class this afternoon.

I'm taking CSC416, Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, this semester. Up untill now, the only thing we had been doing was learning LISP and writing programs using one of it's variant, Common LISP. Yes, from the lectures we knew that LISP is popular language for artificial intelligence research. But other than that, we didn't talk about AI all that much. But last class, Graci showed us Grundy's Game, and talke about state space interpretation of game playing and game trees. Things started to get interesting. Then in today's class, we played Reversi, or sometimes called Othello, which is a strategy game taking place on a 8 by 8 grid with two players represented by two different colors. Player make their moves by putting a piece that will out-flank the opponent's pieces. To win the game you have to have pieces of your color than your opponent's when the game ends (no empty cell left). It is simple yet heavily stragety-involved. Graci used this game to talk about static value function and look-ahead tree/heuristic. This sounds like what those AI programs in computer games are doing. It's so interesting! And the game, Reversi, itself is very intriguing as well. Even though it sounded like a real tough job when he said we're gonna write a program of Reversi as a final project, I was still happy that I can take a class like this. Graci might not be the most interseting person in the world, but he is a true geek, and I say it in a good way, and he knows how to teach. Just like Mohammadi, he is one of my favorite professors here in OSU. I'm thinking about taking AI2 next semester. Hmm... I should talk to my adviser, Odendahl, soon.