Okay, welcome to the new course, Symbolic Methods in Artificial Intelligence.

Given that this is a new course that is intended to be before symbolic methods, I can see a

lot of familiar faces.

And I have a very good theory, I think, of why that is.

That's perfectly fine.

Yeah, so what this course tries to do is to prepare people for symbolic methods.

The reason we have this course is even though we try to kind of see that you have the necessary

education in the admissions procedure, it doesn't seem that we are successful enough.

People are struggling with symbolic AI, typically because of what we think are the computer science

prerequisites for symbolic AI.

And so we basically offer a prep course for that.

It's mostly things that we think you should have learned in the bachelor's, plus a little

bit more.

And we know that many programs do not concentrate on these kind of foundational things.

So there's going to be something in between these upper and lower lines, that's basically

what we're trying to, what I'll be trying to teach you.

But not everybody knows this.

If you don't, then you're in the right course.

If you're just trying to get these pesky two and a half credits for the symbolic pillar,

that's also okay.

But there's a certain danger there.

If you think you know all that is going to be covered in this course, you're wrong.

I'm going to try to make certain things that you usually are supposed to learn by osmosis

because they kind of occur and you kind of pick them up as you go.

I'm going to make these explicit and try to actually teach them to you.

You're supposed to learn them like gymnastics in school.

You had gymnastics in school, you had all these things where you kind of had to get

on top of a big iron bar that was kind of somewhere up there and you were supposed

to do certain things.

I never understood them until I actually got the teacher to the blackboard, which our gym

class had one, and got him to explain to me how the center of mass and the rotational

forces worked and then I could actually do it.

I'm going to try to do that for many of the things that in a usual math or CS class people

are doing as a gymnastics teacher does normally.

Look what I'm doing and then they kind of somehow end up on top of that iron bar and

nobody knows.

Many people can actually pick it up as they go along, in gymnastics at least.

I'll try to do that for you like the teacher did for me on the blackboard.

To end the story, that gives me the opportunity to ask many more questions in the exam that

you would normally not be asked because nobody has taught you these things explicitly.

So if you think just because you survived AI-1, it's automatic that you survive the

SMAI exam, think again.

Okay?

I'm not interested in giving trivial courses.

I don't even know how.

Okay, good.

So what are we going to cover?

I've tried to formulate it negatively.

If you know all of those or the majority of those, then you probably don't have to take

this course.