Artificial Intelligence with Logic Programming

Welcome to the homepage for COMS30106! The relevant people for this unit are:

Who	Where	Contact
Peter Flach (unit director)	MVB 3.31	Drop in to see if I'm free, or book an appointment here.
Kacper Sokol (teaching assistant)	In the lab	Ask a question on the Blackboard forum
Benny Clark (teaching assistant)	In the lab	Ask a question on the Blackboard forum

Links

• SWI-Prolog homepage (go here for documentation and if you want to install SWI-Prolog on your own computer)
• Simply Logical homepage (go here for an on-line copy of the textbook and downloadable programs)
• NEW: interactive version of the book (work in progress)
• Lots of Prolog links

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Syllabus and coursework

The course syllabus is outlined in the table below. We follow Chapters 1-9 of Simply Logical (Chapters 2 and 4 are for self-study and not examinable). Please try to read the indicated parts of the book before the lecture. Handouts with copies of the slides will be available at the lectures.

The book is now out of print; a PDF file can be freely downloaded via the link above. If you want a hardcopy, you may be able to buy a new or second-hand copy through Amazon. The Engineering library holds a number of copies of the book.

Week (approx)	Topic	Materials	Lab and coursework	Stuff to try
13-14	Getting started	COMS30106 slides Chapter 1 of the book SLchapter1 slides haskell2prolog slides	Getting started	chapter1.pl ailp_movies.pl Eliza.pl Graphviz
15-16	Prolog programming	Chapter 3 of the book SLchapter3 slides	Lab examples Assignment 1	chapter3.pl lecture2.pl path.pl wp.pl
17-18	Search	Chapters 5-6 of the book SLchapter5 slides SLchapter6 slides	Assignment 2	chapter5.pl chapter6.pl
19-20	Natural language	Chapter 7 of the book SLchapter7 slides		chapter7.pl nl_shell2.pl
21-22	Reasoning with incomplete information	Chapter 8 of the book SLchapter8 slides		chapter8.pl
23-24	Advanced topics and revision	Chapter 9 of the book SLchapter9 slides		chapter9.pl section92.pl section93.pl

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Support

General: Please see the page about communication in the department for a general introduction. If you need to contact me, my personal preferences are outlined below. The bottom line is: I much prefer personal communication to email, but I will expect that you first have exhausted all other resources, in particular:

• the hand-outs (searchable PDF);
• the textbook (searchable PDF);
• the helpdesk.

Office: I don't have office hours, but I am in my office about half the time. Problems are often solved quickest by a face to face discussion, so feel free to drop in if you want to discuss something of importance, and don't be too disheartened if I'm not in the first time. If I'm in but busy with something else, I will make an appointment with you. Of course, you can often catch me for a brief word just before or after a lecture.

Forum: The forum can be a very effective medium for students to help each other. I keep an eye on the postings and may answer some questions myself, particularly if they are good questions and the answer would be useful to everyone. However, you shouldn't rely on the forum as a means to get a quick response from me.

Email: Email is very useful for me to contact all of you, but it is a bad way for you to contact me due to the sheer volume of email I receive. Try to assess whether your email can be answered in a couple of sentences; if not, come to see me instead. And please don't send me large (>500KB) attachments, put them in your web space and email me the URL.

Feedback: The assignments on this unit are marked semi-automatically. An individual marking report consisting of a break-down of the marks and the automark output will be made available through the on-line submission system.