Homework Four

Assigned: 10/22/03
Due: 10/29/03, noon
Code to use in subject line:  HW4

Things to do:

Finish your solution to the Unicorn Problem that you started working on in tonight's class.  Your solution must include

• Representations of the two alternative sequences of events.
• An answer, i.e., which one has a higher temperature of the coffee/milk mixture at the end.
• An explanation of that answer, justifying it in terms of what physical processes, influences, and ordinal relationships hold during the events.
• To keep the explanation focused and simplify your task, you can ignore the participants and conditions of the processes instances you describe.

Hint: It is very useful to talk about continuous parameters of temporal subabstractions.  You may find yourself needing to define one or more new parameters.

Extra Credit #1: Include explicit representations of the participants in the physical process instances involved and the conditions under which they occur.

Extra Credit #2: Implement the representational vocabulary and inference rules sufficient to automatically instantiate the appropriate process instances from a general description of types of physical processes, e.g., analogous to the physical process descriptions in the slides.

Extra Credit #3: Implement inference rules that take as input a pair of sequence of events and automatically reaches a reasonable conclusion about which course of action would be better, in terms of a higher value for some goal parameter.

Reading:

Forbus, K. (1984). Qualitative process theory. Artificial Intelligence, 24, 85-168., up to Section 4.

Last edited 10/22/03, by KDF.  KR Course home