There are two lectures per week. Their purpose is to delineate the material to be tackled through reading and laboratory work and to explain some of the trickier concepts.
| Day | Time | Place |
| Thursdays | 16.00-16.50 | BSMS Teaching Rm. 2.10 |
| Fridays | 12.00-12.50 | BSMS Teaching Rm. 2.10 |
These lectures will cover introductory POP-11 programming, and various topics in general AI programming. Note that the lectures in the earlier part of the course are primarily intended for students with only one term's computing experience. However, we shall try to give others something to challenge them. We also hope that the more experienced students will be willing to help the less experienced.
Last year's lecture slides are available from Celia McInnes in the Informatics Department. These slides are available here in PDF. Note that this year's lectures are likely to be different, and will largely follow other material available on-line, such as the textbook by Ben du Boulay and Chris Thornton on AI through search (see reading list), and Teach files relating to various topics, as shown in the table below. You may not find it possible to get through all the listed Teach files -- we have included more than most people can manage so that those who find them easy don't run out of work to do.
Teach and Help files in italics really are optional, and should only be done if you have time - many of these are quite interesting however.
Where topic titles above are shown as ``links'' there are materials extra to the course notes now available.
| APPROX. WEEK | TOPICS | TEACH FILES |
| 1 | Introduction, VED and XVED, compilation, execution | TEACH, VED, VEDPOP, MOREVED, BUFFERS, SHELL, LS, MARK, LMR, ENTER_G, COGS_ALIASES, ABUSES, EMAIL.ETIQUETTE, DOCUMENTATION, TEACHFILES, VEDCOMMS |
| 2 | Objects and Expressions, Procedures and the Stack | |
| 3 | Conditionals and Pattern Matching | DEFINE, TRACE, IF, VARS, LISTS, ARROW, STACK, MATCHES, LISTSUMMARY, VED_WHAT, VEDSEARCH, RESPOND |
| 4 | Loops, Recursion | LOOPS, FOREACH, REPORTS, RECURSION, HELP LISTS, HELP CONTROL, RESPOND, DATATHINK, SIR, FOREVERY, PROGSTYLE, SETS, SETS2, EFFICIENCY, BLOCKS |
| 5 | The ``Boxes Model'' of Lists, State Space Search | SEARCHING, TOWER |
| 6 | Problem Reduction, Common errors, Poplog | SHELL, SHELLSUMM, HELP MAN, CSH, VM, GC, INITIAL.EX, SYSOBEY |
| 7 | Datastructures, Input/Output | DATASTRUCTURES, CLASSES, IO |
| 8 | Vars and Lvars, Project details | TRACE, DEBUGGER, VARIABLES, LEXICAL, LVARS, PROPOSALS, REPORTS, PROJECTS, PSTYLE, OBJECTCLASS, PROCESS, VM, GC, EFFICIENCY, PROGSTYLE, REF REFFILES |
| 9 | LISP | READLISP, CLISP, LISPVED |
| 10 | Summary |
