tanya@MOJAVE.STANFORD.EDU (Tanya Walker) (03/21/87)
[Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-STRIPE.] ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT-EE392H Problem Solving, Learning, and Hardware Design Spring Quarter, 1987 (3 units) Instructor: Professor Daniel Weeise, CIS 207, 5-3711 Time: Tuesday and Thursday 4:15 to 5:30 pm Place: ESMB 138 The aim of this course is to understand state-of-the-art AI techniques for planning, problem solving, and learning. This course is the starting point for investigating "self-configurable" systems capable of becoming expert problem solvers in given domains. Our particular domain of interest is hardware design. The global problem is automatically creating expert hardware designers for different types of hardware. Extant planners, such as Tweak, Molgen, and Soar will be studied first. We will then look at truth maintenance systems. Then we will investigate the learning and generalization methods of Strips, Soar, Hacker, and similar systems. We will briefly discuss domain exploration (a la Hasse and Lenat) and reflection (a la Smith). We will then investigate using general problem solving methods to solve problems from integrated circuit design. Examples include channel routing, leaf cell generation, logic design, and global routing. We will study two expert systems: Joobbani's Weaver system for channel routing, and Kowalski's DAA system for VLSI design. They will be used as examples of expert systems which might be automatically generated. This will be largely a reading and discussion course. Students will be required to write a term paper. Familarity with basic AI techniques will be assumed. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor.