Monthly Archives: December 2008

Progress Report – December 2008

The month began by reviewing my college Probability and Statistics book (Devore 1991).  I needed to review standard probability concepts mentioned in articles and the Stanford machine learning class.  For example, the article Learning with a Mixture of Trees (Meila and Jordan 2000) the authors explain the new algorithm by using Joint Probabilities and probabilistic mathematics to describe the algorithm – a similar used by Dr. Ng in his machine learning lectures.

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WISE Compiled

After fixing the return of thread status call from a boolean to the thread.state type, inspite of the other 60 coding warnings, I successfully started the WISE software, and exited.

I will explore the User’s manual further on setting up a trial run.

IMLS

The International Machine Learning Society website is back up.

WISE

This week I downloaded the WISE software from University of Texas, Arlington (UTA). According to the build instructions it was developed using Java 1.3.0; however, that is not available and the latest is Java v1.6 u11. After installing the JDK in my Linux environment, I started to compile the program ran into 73 warnings and 1 one error. Two changes are to the dialog box show() and hide() functions; they were replaced by setVisible(true) and setVisible(false), respectively. There are other errors, but I am still reviewing them.

AIMA Book

I was reading Chapters 6 and 7 of the AIMA book (Russell, Norvig 1995). They describe propositional calculus, which from their perspective is a weak form logic. The authors start with the basics and build on the fundamentals by demonstrating the language using Backus Naur Form (BNF).  They used the Wumpus World as an example and demostrated that it will take at 6400 propositional logic statements to adequately describe the 4×4 Wumpus World.

In the next Chapter, the authors discuss predicate calculus and show its BNF.  The main focus is on first order predicate calculus and then applying it to the Wumpus World example.  They discuss the frame problem and situation calculus.  They used predicate calculus to demonstrate the differences and static components between two situations, which includes the frame axioms.

The discussion was neatly tied together between a problem and predicate calculus unlike the Luger book that I read earlier.  In the Luger the frame problem was used to illustrate robotic planning in the block’s world.

My goals are to run the AIMA wumpus world lisp code and complete the predicate calculus of the Wumpus world problem.

IMLS Website

Has anyone know what happened to the International Machine Learning Society Website? Did it move? If so, what is the new URL?