Week 3: Journal Questions
Answer the following questions for
Monday's reading:
- Give an example from your own problem-solving experience
where you've applied abstraction. What detail(s) did you
abstract? What detail(s) were critical to preserve?
- How would you begin to explain the concepts of
the frontier and expanding a node to a friend at
the College who is not a computer scientist?
Answer the following questions for
Wednesday's reading:
- Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain an example of a problem
from your own experience where a large branching factor
prevented you from finding a good solution efficiently.
- Russell and Norvig state: "In general, iterative deepening
is the preferred uninformed search method when the search
space is large and the depth of the solution is not known"
(p. 90). Identify the sentence from the reading that you
believe best supports this claim. Briefly (3-5 sentences)
explain your choice.
- Select the sentence or short passage (no more than three
sentences, please) that you find most interesting or
provocative. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain why you selected
this particular sentence or short passage.
Answer the following questions for
Fridays's reading:
- Pages 94-95 give arguments for the optimality of A* under
two heuristic conditions: admissibility and consistency. State
which argument or condition you find more intuitive and/or
convincing. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain your choice. (Be
sure to relate aspects of both in your explanation).
- Of those suggested in the text, identify the technique for
creating heuristics that you would likely try first on a new
problem. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain your choice.
- Identify the sentence, section, or concept from today's
reading that remains the most confusing to you. Briefly (3-5
sentences) explain what you find confusing about it.