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JA5. Learning Journal 5

The Learning Journal is a tool for self-reflection on the learning process. The Learning Journal will be assessed by your instructor as part of your Final Grade.

Answer the following questions

1. Describe what you did. You need to describe what you did and how you did it

This was the 5th week of this course; it was all about knowledge representation and reasoning. I started materials assigned in the learning guide, then I did the discussion assignment which was about comparing consistency-based diagnosis and abductive diagnosis. I also did the programming assignment which was about implementing a knowledge base and an inference engine to determine the validity of a query using propositional logic.

2. Describe your reactions to what you did

I found the topics presented so far to be of great importance theoretically and practically. However, I found what we did so far is far from practical applications. I think that adding more practical examples and exercises would be beneficial for the students. The textbook has some examples but most of them are theoretical and very far away from artificial intelligence models that we deal with in a day to day basis.

3. Describe any feedback you received or any specific interactions you had while participating discussion forum or the assignment Discuss how they were helpful

The feedback I received on my discussion assignment was mostly positive. I found that, in the context of an intelligent tutoring system for teaching elementary physics, ABD (Abductive Diagnosis) may be more suitable because its reasoning provide great benefit for the users. For example, if a student solves a problem in a new approach that is not included in the knowledge base, an ABD system can still diagnose if the solution is correct or not. In contrast, a CBD (Consistency-Based Diagnosis) may flag the new approach as wrong because it is not included in the knowledge base.

4. Describe your feelings and attitudes

I found the topic of logic to be interesting, however, it reminded me of boolean algebra which I found to be difficult and I barely passed it. I find the boolean type and operations on it to be confusing and the most difficult part of programming. I am worried that I may not be able to understand the topic of propositional logic and reasoning.

5. Describe what you learned. You can think of one or more topics and explain your understanding in writings

A proposition is a statement offered for consideration. We learned about propositions, knowledge bases, assumptions, induction, deduction, abduction, propositional constraints, propositional definite clauses, querying a knowledge base, debugging and diagnosing knowledge bases, consistency-based diagnosis, and abductive diagnosis (Taipala, 2014).

I learned about the knowledge required for consistency-based diagnosis and abductive diagnosis, and the main advantages of using abductive diagnosis over consistency-based diagnosis and vice versa. I learned that consistency-based diagnosis is about checking how consistent the observed behavior is with the expected behavior, and abductive diagnosis is about finding the best explanation for the observed behavior (Poole & Mackworth, 2017).

I learned that Rule: Cause -> Effect. A rule is a statement that links some conditions to some conclusions. A rule is a proposition of the form if A then B where A is the antecedent and B is the consequent. In induction, we infer a rule from examples. In deduction, we infer a conclusion from a rule and some conditions. In abduction, we infer a rule from a conclusion and some conditions.

6. Did you face any challenges while doing the discussion or the development assignment? Were you able to solve it by yourself?

I found building a simple knowledge base and inference engine in the programming assignment to be excited. I was much more manageable when I though of it in terms of simple building blocks first. I focused only on the implication, conjugation, and disjunction operators and then I was able to simply build the knowledge base using those operators nesting them like a natural english sentence.

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