We had two final project presentations today for CIS 730 (Artificial Intelligence). Both were among the five who worked on the Roguelike game Angband. Our goal was to look at specific behaviors and improve them.

The first student, Dave Lupo, wanted to improve the tendency of the BenBorg (by Ben Harrison) to be a shopaholic. He trained a feedforward artificial neural net (ANN) using backpropagation to compute a better "dive motivator". This lowered the ratio of time in town vs. dungeon, and he found that increasing the ratio of "time in the dungeon" to "time in town" increased survivability.

Dave plotted the "time in town vs. time in dungeon" curve for 13 characters before his improved dive function, and 14 characters after, and found that they did have higher XP-to-move ratios. He speculated that they had higher survivability as a result, though these results were inconclusive. (I suggested that he look at the slope of the line to see if ' it really improved survivability.)

Now, here's the funny part. The points were all at time of character death, because he lost most of the characters at low levels, but I was sure he didn't lose them all by level 14, so I asked him what the rightmost point was. "Oh, that's time of death after 150000 turns". I asked, "what do you mean, after 150K turns?" He replied that to impose a time limit, he didn't just end the borg run at 150K; he sets "target level = 99" so that it essentially goes: "Morgoth... I'm comin' to get you!" and commences a Rambo-esque death dive!

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Banazir

Apropos of my discussions on attendance: it is important to speak up when one is confused, or needs help. Students aren't mind readers and, more to the point, neither are instructors.

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Banazir

n: 10 (this is not counting one distance student's grade)
Min: 70
Max: 173
Mean: 123.2
Median: 124.5
Standard deviation: 34.41

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Banazir

OK, if definitely seems as if the CIS 490/730 (Principles of AI) midterm exam was a bit long. People generally skipped half a problem to one full problem out of 5.

Edit, 06:00 CDT Mon 24 Oct 2006 - Here is the exam, and here is the solution.

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Banazir

Apropos of our continuing discussion treating adult students as such: how much do students really know what is good for them, as far as workload and expectations are concerned?

I ask because I'm sure that I've earned the reputation (for better or for worse) of having high expectations. On the plus side, this means I have acceptably high standards and am less likely to turn out "Jaywalker bait" into the CS/IT industry. I call this "keeping our name out of the dumb columns". On the minus side, I've been called a slave driver (though only in Chinese to my face, when the speaker didn't think I could understand; that was amusing).

rsmit212 showed me a comic strip once that concluded, "where knowledge is the commodity, the customer is always wrong". That's a clever notion, but how true is it?

I'm really looking for discussion, BTW, not just validation or critique. Some of the best insights I have gotten from my blog have been through dialogue, sometimes debates between second and third parties that I am only involved in as a bystander or facilitator.

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Banazir

My first evening hour exam was Fri 06 Oct 2006 - I moved it from class time (2:30 - 3:20pm) to afternoon (5:30 - 6:45pm) under the assumption that some or most could use an extra 25 minutes.

Afterwards, students told me I was right. "It would have been possible but a tight squeeze to finish it in 60 minutes and extremely hard in 50, but with 75 we had about 10 minutes left to clean up and check our work."

I've heard that exams should be written so that students get 3-5 times as long as it took the instructor to solve the problem. I usually allow about twice as long (60 minutes for an exam I work in 30 minutes, 75 for one that takes me 35-40 minutes), and it's been a tight squeeze.

What's your experience been, as a student or as an instructor? (Please say what you took or taught.)

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Banazir

So, about attendance.

What was your experience as a high school student? As an undergraduate? Did professors care whether people showed up?

Does it matter? Should we just assume every college student has adult responsibilities and treat them accordingly?

Do recorded lectures available on the web (e.g., Tegrity recordings) help more or hurt things more?

( My take on attendance )
( A side rant on cell phones and other technology )

In other news: Wei Wu took me and several of her other friends to go see the 2006 U.S. Army Soldier Show at McCain. It was surprisingly good: the choreography was fairly well done (in some cases they had to make do with the less-trained talent that they had, though one or two of the performers were excellent) and the singing was consistently very good. Thanks for the invite, Wei!

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Banazir

State of the courses: I'm hearing some positive (second-hand) feedback about the organization and content of my AI and database courses this fall, which is a good sign. People still say I'm going too fast. That's clearly true in CIS 730 (Principles of Artificial Intelligence), but I'm not sure what to do about that in CIS 560 (Database System Concepts). I've actually added a little content (on CSPs and Prolog) to AI, but I've pared the DB course down as far as it will go without being Video Professor Teaches DBMS.

I'm a little concerned about attendance and class participation, but that's a rant for another day.

In other news: We need a semiotician or classical linguist at Kansas State for the comptranslation project. I've been looking for someone from English, but perhaps I should be checking with Philosophy for a semiotics specialist? Someone who's been down Arts and Sciences way at K-State (or has a spouse or SO who has): any suggestions?

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Banazir

How did it ever get this bad?

Every year we get a crop of new students. By and large, and modulo some small drift, they aren't smarter or dumber than the previous year's cohort. We start training them, advise them (insofar as we may) on taking courses and doing projects, we get a finished crop that is, one hopes, competent at some aspects of computer science.

Since about three years ago, though, I'm starting to see a severe disconnect between learning and reading. Apathy is at record levels. Laziness sems worse; background, weak. What's worse, there's that same "assiduously anti-intellectual" stance on the part of just a few people that I once attributed to a swing of the socially liberal/conservative pendulum.

The truth of the matter, though, is that I'd be hard pressed to explain to an alien visitor who had last come here a couple of decades ago what is going on right now.

Any ideas? (Your mileage may vary.)

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Banazir

For those of you who speak, read, and write English as a second language: where did you take it, and what did you do that gave you the most practice when you first had to start using it intensively for work and study?

Yes, I'm asking on behalf of a few new grad students. I have some hope for this group, though their scholastic aptitudes vary as ever. Like hpguo, almost all of the new grads have had recent ESL coursework, but a couple of them are hitting the language barrier hard.

hpguo told me back in the day that he learned the most English just by watching prime-time network TV. Banamum watched Let's Make A Deal. I wonder: how much practice do you suppose suffices for being able to follow lectures? A hundred hours? A thousand? 400,000 practice words? 4 million? Yes, very yes?

ETA, 11:10 CDT Sat 02 Sep 2006 - I forgot to ask: what was your first language (or what were your first languages)?

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Banazir

logorrhea (English neologism, Greek roots) - an excessive flow of words, prolixity [Gr logos word + roia flow, stream] (submitted by inever)

( Previous months' cool words... )

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( The power of communication )

In other news:

• I wish I could still get by on three hours a night of sleep.


• taiji_jian does the definitive Kermit the Frog impression, as sui_degeneris aptly predicted. It's a little too natural, if you know what I mean.


• Score one for Linux - it's downright glorious that Skype works on this Ubuntu-running ThinKPad (Numerramar) but not on my WinXP Inspiron (Hirilonde).


• I need a mail client that can cache headers; Mozilla Thunderbird is good, but it's just too slow at searching through my hundred thousand e-mails, so I'm hoping Beagle (an add-on to Thunderbird) does the trick.

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Banazir

This fall, I am again teaching CIS 560 (Database System Concepts) and CIS 730 (Artificial Intelligence). The latter has an undergrad version, CIS 490 (to be listed as CIS 530 in subsequent years), with which it shares lectures.

I'm very excited about both courses this time: not only have I given AI an complete overhaul, but I've planned out three project topics that I think will keep students' attention. I've revamped the term projects and all homeworks in DB. The lectures are similar in content, but I have redistributed the lesson material and eliminated some advanced topics so as to spend more time working problems in class.

My first lectures of the year went rather well, though there were still a few kids in the back of my required course that didn't look too enthused. I have a plan to wake them up with some practical DB projects.

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Banazir

Seeing as I run a research group devoted to Knowledge Discovery in Databases, I thought I'd mine my IM contact list data. Here are some demographics I found interesting.

( Research students )
( Alumni on contact list )
( Affiliate students on contact list )

Moral of the story: get Trillian or GAIM, everyone! Multi-IM clients keep everyone interconnected and cut down on the overhead for those of us who are otherwise forced to relay messages from one service to another.

Also, which of my contacts have Skype or Google Talk? Please reply to this message (you can do it "anonymously", but please give your name or IM).

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Banazir

I must say, things are looking up.

( Fresh versions of AI and Database Courses )
( On the new and previous crop of students )
( On the Gates )

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Banazir

So.

Grades are in.

Why is it that there are more thirteenth-hour questions than there were eleventh-hour ones?

I mean, I know I try to put students at ease when they needn't be alarmed, just because some of them are very antsy, and some are just a little insecure. Some students should be worried, though! To wit: grad students on the brink of a C or undergrads on the brink of a D or F should hit the books (or come and check on missing homeworks or their absolute standing) before the final. It's easy to say "I didn't see a grade posting, so I just guessed (read: assumed) I was okay"; it's quite another to know you only turned in half the assignments or turned the hour exams in half blank and then count on the curve.

... right?

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Banazir

Dangerous! And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet, unless you are brought alive before the seat of the Dark Lord. And Aragorn is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli son of Gloin; for you are dangerous yourself, in your own fashion.
    -Gandalf, The Two Towers

Congratulations to my first doctoral alum, Haipeng Guo aka hpguo (Ph.D. Kansas State University, 2003). Currently a visiting assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), established 1991, he has just been hired as the newest faculty member of United International College (UIC), the newest university in China!



United International College (UIC)
Zhuhai, Guangdong (Canton) Province, China
Established 2005

( Details about the university )

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Banazir