Intro To AI Through Games & Puzzles
Learning The Fundamental Of AI By Teaching The Computer How To Solve Challenging Puzzles and Play Games Against Human
The objective of this course is to provide students with an exposure to the foundation of Artificial Intelligence. It’s also our objective to make AI learning relevant, intuitive, and fun for younger students while keeping academic rigor. The focus is for students to learn to “teach” the computer how to solve problems and to develop their computational thinking skills.
The curriculum centers around popular puzzles such as Sudoku, Wordly, and Tower of Hanoi, and games such as Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect 4, and Reversi. The curriculum exposes students to the important concept of graph and search which plays a central role in AI. Students will learn various search algorithms from simple Depth First Search (DFS) to A* (heuristic search) to Minimax algorithm. Students will also learn various techniques for improving their program efficiency.
The curriculum is organized into two 10 week sessions where the first session focuses on basic algorithms while the second session will consider more advanced topics. The curriculum is project-based, students will be creating programs that solve these interesting puzzles and play games against human.
Intro To AI (I): Graph & Search
We start with learning how to teach a computer to play Tic-Tac-Toe using heuristics and solve Wordle problems, students learn how to "teach" the computer problem solving. Then the concept of graph and search is introduced. Students learn how to use search techniques to solve more challenging problems such as the 8 slider puzzle.
Intro To AI (II): Improvement Search Performance
For more complex puzzles the standard search techniques will take too long. We will learn algorithms (such as A*) that can help reduce the search space thus making our algorithms more efficient. We will also learn Minimax algorithms for playing games that are more complex than Tic-Tac-Toe.