COMP34120 - Artificial Intelligence and Games -- Course Structure
This is a full year course. Each semester is divided into two halves:
- The first six teaching weeks
- consists of lectures and outside reading.
- The second teaching five weeks
- consists of group project work.
The project work constitutes 60% of the mark. The project work from each
semester counts 30%. There is one final exam at the end which
constitutes 40%.
- Semester 1:
- The structure and theory of games (JLS)
- What is a game?
- What does it mean to solve a game.
- Representing strategy spaces.
- Finding good strategies through heuristics and search.
- Finding good strategies through learning.
- Weeks 1 - 5, 7:
- Lectures and reading on game theory and solving
games. (Week 6 is reading week, no classes.)
- Weeks 8 - 12:
- Group project work. You will work in groups of 4 or
less. You will make a bot which plays a particular two-player
game. It will then participate in a tournament with the other
groups' bots.
During the group project work, there only formal meetings are:
- Week of November 19:
- You must declare what you are going to do, and how
to divide up the tasks. You must also upload a proforma with
this information to Blackboard.
- Week of December 10:
- Presentations of your approach.
- Location:
- The Collab is booked for you work work together,
and for us to give you help. (Same times as the lecture slots.)
- Project Due:
- 11:59pm, Friday, December 14, 2018.
- Semester 2:
- Pricing Games and Mechanism Design (XJZ)
- Leader-Follower and Stackelberg games.
- Applications to pricing and marketing.
- Learning the opponent's strategy.
- Mechanism design and the design of game rules.
- Weeks 19 - 24:
- Lectures and reading.
- Weeks 25 - 28, 32:
- Group project work. Just like the first
semester, except your agent will employ learning.(Weeks 29 - 31 are
Easter Break.)
- Week 26:
- (w/c March 18, 20191) You must declare what you are going to do, and how
to divide up the tasks.
- Week 32:
- (w/c April 29, 20191) Presentations of your approach and submission of
your bot to the tournament.
- Project Due:
- 5pm May 5, 2019.
Rules for forming groups for semester 1:
- You may form your own group, of 4 or less members, by signing up
in your group using the Semester 1: Project Group Sign-up section
on Blackboard. First agree on the members of your group, then add the
names to the first empty group under this section. You can give your
group a name or description if you want.
You must sign up by Friday 19 October at 5pm.
- All remaining students will be assigned to groups by the lecturers.
Semester 2 will be similar.
- Project work:
- There are two projects, one each semester. Each
counts 30%. This assessment of the group will come from the following
components:
- Content of the approach:()
- How good was your idea, how
well-informed by the course or outside literature, how creative,
etc.
- Performance of the approach:()
- This will be measured in terms
of how well it plays. A good bot will be a strong player
and make decisions quickly.
The assessment of the individuals' contributions will contribute to
how the group mark is distributed across the group, as assessed using three methods:
- Self-assessment,
- Report of the contribution on the group Journal,
- Questioning by the lecturers.
Each group will be set up with a Group Journal on
Blackboard2 You must use this
to document your ideas and work to the lecturers. Specifically,
- Each individual must document their contribution to the
work. The best way is to keep a diary on the group Journal which
you update periodically outlining what you have done.
- There needs to be a description of the method used in the
programme you submit. You could also document ideas or
explorations which did not make it into the final
submission. This could be in the form of a group journal which
is updated periodically, or a report written at the end.
- Note: you may use any method of collaboration that you
chose, but you must use the Journal to communicate what you
have done to the lecturers.
- Exam:
- The final exam will cover the material from both
semesters. The exam counts
40%.
We will use Blackboard. Once the groups are formed, we will give each
group a group Journal. We expect you to use that to document the work and your
contribution to it. We will use this in our assessment of the project
and your contribution.
There is no book. Lecture notes, handouts, etc. will be accessible via
Blackboard. The lectures will be podcast.
COMP34120 - Artificial Intelligence and Games -- Course Structure
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Footnotes
- ... 20191
- These dates subject to change
- ... Blackboard2
- On Blackboard, group Journals, unlike group
Wikis, can only be read by members of the group and the
course instructors.
Jonathan Shapiro
2018-09-20