CPSC 422

Practice Final Exam

April 2007

This is meant to give some example questions. You can expect questions that show your knowledge of the details (e.g., VI, Q-learning, meta-interpreters), as well as testing your understanding about the bigger picture. Note that this practice exam emphasizes the last half of the course. The final exam will cover all parts of the course. You should also look at the practice midterm and the actual midterm. There will be similar questions to the midterm (particularly the questions students did not do as well at).

You may bring into the exam a letter sized sheet of paper with anything written on it. You may not use calculators, PDAs, robotic assistants or other electronic aids.

Some important points (that students often forget):

Read and answer the question. You will not get marks for writing things (whether they are true or not) that are not relevant to the question.
Use proper English in full sentences. You will not get marks if we cannot work out what you are saying.
If a question asks about a particular instance of a problem, make sure your answer refers to that instance. Writing a general formula that you may have copied from the sheet you can bring in, is not worth any marks. (The questions are usually asking to apply that formula to a particular case, to make sure you understand it).

Suppose you have a job at a company that is building on-line teaching tools. As you have taken more than one AI course, and have done a number of assignments using different techniques for the same problem, your boss wants to know your opinion on various options they are considering.
They are planning on building an intelligent tutoring system for teaching elementary physics (e.g., mechanics and electro-magnetism). One of the things that the system will need to do is to diagnose errors that a student may be making.

For each of the following, answer the explicit questions and use proper English. Answering parts not asked or giving more than one answer when only one is asked for will annoy the boss and result in reduced marks in the exam. The boss also doesn't like jargon, so please use straightforward English.

The boss has heard of consistency-based diagnosis, abductive diagnosis and belief networks, but wants to know what they involve in the context of building an intelligent tutoring system for teaching elementary physics.
1. Explain what knowledge (about physics and about students) consistency-based diagnosis requires.
2. Explain what knowledge (about physics and about students) abductive diagnosis requires.
3. What is the main advantage of using abductive diagnosis over consistency-based diagnosis in this domain?
4. What is the main advantage of consistency-based diagnosis over abductive diagnosis in this domain?
5. Explain what knowledge (about physics and about students) a belief network model requires.
6. What is the main advantage of using belief networks (over using abductive diagnosis or consistency-based diagnosis) in this domain?
7. What is the main advantage of using abductive diagnosis or consistency-based diagnosis compared to using belief networks in this domain?
Represent a problem that can be used for abduction or consistency-based diagnosis, such as Exercise 9.6.
Write a meta interpreter to do something that you haven't seen. (e.g., Exercise 8.4).
Find the conflicts and the diagnoses for a particular example domain, (e.g., Exercise 9.5 and 9.6).
Find the abductive diagnoses or model a domain so you can find the abductive diagnoses. (e.g., Exercise 9.1).
Explain something about ontologies. What they are? Why knowledge-based systems need them? Why do we use object-property-value triples? What are classes? What are subclasses?