Spring 2026 Computer Science 4580. 4/13/2026

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Logical Problem of the Day

Elon Musk's xAI chatbot is called grok. What is the origin of the word: grok?

https://pollev.com/slade You may also download the app to your phone. Use the "slade" poll id.

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.

  • Yale Information Society Project Free lunch. This week.

  • Remember the discussion of when a computer should lie? Last week's New Yorker has a profile: Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?" which points out that many people think he is a liar and a sociopath. He tries to avoid conflict by agreeing with whomover is speaking. He wants them to like him. One could conclude that the sycophant ChatGPT is made in his image. (Check out the AI generated animation.)

  • The New Yorker article quotes Paul Graham who publishes essays about LISP and other stuff, like FAQs and RAQs.

  • We have our last guest speaker this Wednesday: George V. Neville-Neil. We will take George out to dinner at Mory's. You may still sign up!
    1. Yassin Mudawi (missed Fried)

  • Here are Ben Fried's slides from last week. Please post your speaker comments to discussions

  • More explanation strategies: going to Yale, picking stocks, recommending devices. See discussions
    The VOTE program had a dozen or so explanation strategies that guided the decision making process and justified the choice. There are lots of explanation strategies. In an effort to crowd source the data collection process, I am asking each of you to provide one or more explanation strategies for each of the following decision domains:
    1. Why you chose to come to Yale?
    2. Recommending a stock (hw2).
    3. Recommending a device (hw3).
    You get discussion credit for your responses.

  • Project presentations. Starting next week, we will have in class presentations for projects. You are not expected to have completed the project. It can be vaporware. If you are in a group, you have to present. Otherwise, individuals may present for extra credit. Send me an email indicating your interest. Here is the schedule so far:

    Monday April 20th

    1. Olivia Ye, Ryan Kulsakdinun. Risk Management and Strategizer.
    2. Xinyuan Zhu, Guangxing Cao, Rena Wang. The Relational Recommender: A Goal-Based Decision System for Context-Driven Gift Selection.
    3. Will Yang. Python reimplementation and expanded-methodologies version of VOTE, adapted to the Japanese parliamentary system.
    4. Arnav Bhakta and Julian Mikush. Movie and music recommendations.
    5. Alex Lu, Jason Chen. Risk management system for equity portfolios.
    6. Hunter Wimsatt and Esha Garg. VOTE in Python.
    7. Zikang Chen, Lucas Liu. Explainable Desktop PC Recommendation System.

    Wednesday April 22nd

    1. Zikang Chen, Lucas Liu. Explainable Desktop PC Recommendation System.
    2. Joseph Yu, Gavin Onghai, Helen Mao. UseItUp: An Explainable Recipe Recommendation System.
    3. Samuel Lee, Tony Chang, and William Wang. Apartment Recommendation System.
    4. Cindy Chen, Shirly Lin, and Daniel Xu. Regime-Aware Multi-Strategy Decision System for BTC Perpetual Markets
    5. Sasha Spiegel. Emotions and Resource Allocation.
    6. Joseph Yu, Gavin Onghai, Helen Mao. UseItUp: An Explainable Recipe Recommendation System.
    7. Nabil Rahman and Rifat Tarafder. A Maqasid-Informed Hiring Recommendation System.
    8. Feliz Zou. Explaining and Interpreting Adversarial Attacks on LLMs.

    Instructions for submitting projects on the zoo

  • submit-instructions.txt Use assignment 6, e.g., 
    /c/cs458/bin/submit 6 projectfiles
    then to check: 
    /c/cs458/bin/check 6
    Let me know if there are issues. There may be software rot.

    Lecture

  • I have office hours Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:30-3:30pm, on zoom, id 459 434 2854.

    Assignments

    You can begin work on hw3.

    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.

    Neat vs Scruffy

    Neats and Scruffies wiki.

    Neat v Scruffy

    Doug Lenat See quotes.

    See also Norvig and Russell, AI a Modern Approach, 4th edition, page 24.

    Case-based Systems

    Case-Based Reasoning: A Research Paradigm Slade, 1990.

    CBR.html MOPs.

    Goals

  • Goals.html See english.

    Relationships

    See GBDMRelationships.html Chapter 5: Relationships.

    Guest Lecture: Kris Hammond

    A New Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence TED talk.

    Kris was a graduate student colleague at Yale. He wrote CHEF.

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