Spring 2026 Computer Science 4580. 3/25/2026
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Logical Problem of the Day
Are These 10 Lies Justified? from The New York Times, December 14, 2015.
Polleverywhere survey results:
- all except 6
- all
- most except 6
- all justified
- all of them
- all of them
- 1,2,5,7,8,9,10
- I think all of these are justified? The overall moral impact of these lies is positive, I believe
- i think all the lies are justified except for 6
- All the lies besides 8 carry some risk. 1 and 5 seem low-risk. But what of emotional anguish for a struggling landlord seeking renters and receiving fake offers?
- I'm most comfortable with #8, since they were informed in advance of the two possibilities.
I asked GPT,
Claude, and
Gemini.
Canvas Quiz of the Day (need daily password)
Most days, there will be a simple canvas quiz related to the lecture.
You need a password to activate the quiz, which I will provide in class.
These quizzes will count toward your class participation grade.
The quiz is available only during class.
Click for today's quiz.
Announcements
Let us know if you have an upcoming event you would like to
share with the class.
Today's guest speaker Wednesday March 25th: Eren Orbey, Microsoft. His talk will NOT be recorded. Be there
or be square. See his New Yorker articles.
We will take Eren to dinner. Here is the list of attendees:
- Alba Quintas Núñez
- Yassin Mudawi
- Hunter Wimsatt
- Francisca Adjei
- Adetola Ade-Oyetayo (not available)
- Esha Garg
and as alternates:
- Andy Ma (promoted)
- Andrei Onut
Please let me know if you cannot come to dinner. We will meet
at Mory's at 6pm.
Yale Information Society Project Free lunch. This week.
Lecture
I have office hours Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:30-3:30pm pm, on zoom, id 459 434 2854.
Assignments
You can begin work on the project.
Recap of Monday 3/23
Milgram Yale experiment - the psychology of genocide. Four prods. Shiller explanation.
Ted Kaczynsky Harvard experiment. and here.
Graham Allison and the Essence of Decision re cuban missile crisis. Alternative
to the economic rational decision maker. "The essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer - often, indeed, to the decider himself." (JFK)
A Giant Leap, Robert Wachler (WSJ)
- Automation degrading human expertise - pilots vs autopilots (recall Vachon)
- Jane Doe in the ER.
The Realm of Decisions
We shall explore Langer's mindlessness / mindfulness dichotomy for
decision making.
For the next class and the coming weeks:
Give an example of an explanation you thought interesting because it was especially good or bad. It can be personal or from the news.
Use the
Discussions section of canvas (not Ed Discussion).
You earn a quiz point by posting to Discussions. Try to analyze
it along the mindless / mindful spectrum.
The Yale AI Project: Cognitive Modelling
See The Yale Artificial Intelligence Project: A Brief History
Stephen Slade, AI Magazine, 1987.
See Conceptual Dependency and Its Descendants
Steven Lytinen, 1992.
- Conceptual Dependency (CD) (slides)
- MARGIE: parse English into CD, infer other concepts, generate
natural languge (English and German, later Chinese)
- Task Orientation
- Psychological process model
- Canonical representation of knowledge
- Translation, synonomy, paraphrase
- Inference
- Ambiguity
- Scripts, plans, goals and understanding (the book Searle read)
- Scripts: SAM, FRUMP
- Plans: PAM, TALESPIN
One day Joe Bear was hungry. He asked his friend Irving Bird where
some honey was. Irving told him there was a beehive in the oak
tree. Joe threatened to hit Irving if he didn’t tell him where some
honey was.
One day Joe Bear was hungry. He asked his friend Irving Bird where
some honey was. Irving told him there was a beehive in the oak
tree. Joe walked to the oak tree. He ate the beehive.
- Learning, memory, and explantion
- Memory Organization Packets (MOPS)
- Bower, Black, and Turner
- CYRUS
- IPP
- Case-based systems (later topic)
- The Yale AI Songbook
Qualitative Arithmetic
See QualitativeArithmetic.html May
be used for hw3.
For each of the following, do you want the quantity to be high, low, or in a range?
- Salary
- Taxes
- Body Temperature
- Ambient Temperature
- weight
- age
- IQ
- sales
- overhead
- profit (sales - overhead)
Postscript: In the discussion of ranges in qualitative
arithmetic, the examples were physiological, e.g., pulse, blood pressure,
weight, temperature. I did not have any economic examples.
The other day, I came across the phrase "Goldilocks Economy" which refers
to a sweet spot where inflation and unemployment are neither too high
nor too low. Bingo! I then realized that more generally, the term
for this phenomenon is equilibrium - which is better than range.
OK?
Rule-based Expert Systems
GPS:
The General Problem Solver. Separated knowledge from process. Means-ends
analysis. See Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, Chapter 4.
Expert systems - an overview. The rules help provide an explanation.
See ExpertSystems.html MYCIN and friends.
http://www.norvig.com/paip/README.html
Truth maintenance Systems
Case-based Systems
Case-Based Reasoning: A Research Paradigm Slade, 1990.
CBR.html
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