CSc 74010, Spring 2008

Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence

Class Schedule: Thursday, 9:30 - 11:30, Room 6495

The course will be based on material that will be posted on the web.

Description: Artificial Intelligence is a very large subject, and courses can be organized around a number of principles. This course is organized around formal logics. People reason in various, complex ways. Classical logic is what most students are familiar with, but it is rather limited. We will investigate several alternative logics that are useful and natural for representing human reasoning. We will begin with classical propositional and predicate logic, and then move on to modal logics, logics of knowledge and belief, temporal logics, multi-valued logics, and if time permits, non-monotonic logics. For each, we will look at semantics and proof procedures, and establish soundness and completeness results. Automation issues for the various logics will be considered. Some Lisp and Prolog programming will be introduced, and implementation of some of the proof procedures will be discussed.

Syllabus: The course is very roughly divided in thirds. The first third covers classical logic, propositional and predicate, proof procedures for it, soundness, completeness, and implementation issues. The second third does the same for modal logics and their relatives: knowledge, belief, temporal logics. The final third covers other logics such as many-valued ones. We may take things out of this order, if it seems appropriate at the time. There will be a midterm and a final exam. Homework will be assigned and collected regularly, and will count toward the final grade.


Free Books on the Internet:

  1. Logic for Computer Science Jean Gallier's Book on resolution-based automated theorem proving, available free on the internet.
  2. Learn Prolog Now by Patrick Blackburn, Johan Bos, and Kristina Striegnitz, in print from College Publications, and available free on the internet.
  3. On Lisp by Paul Graham, Lisp programming book available free on the internet.
  4. Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition, Guy Steele, html format.

Lisp and Prolog Implementations:

  1. Common Lisp Implementations, a listing for various platforms.
  2. Prolog Implementations, a listing for various platforms.

Tests

  1. Midterm, March 20. You can use your notes. It will not cover classical propositional logic. There will be questions on intuitionistic tableaus and models, classical first-order tableaus and models (no equality) and saying things using classical first-order logic. Here are some first-order examples for you to try (you have already seen a few of these).
  2. Final exam

Lecture Material:


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