89-7257 Foundations and Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence

The course will enable students to understand and evaluate major philosophical and technological discussions surrounding AI and its applications.
  • the possibility of AI, strong/weak AI, Turing test
  • Chinese rooms, symbol grounding, physicality
  • scientific method, automated scientific discovery
  • evolution of autonomous behavior, evolutionary psychology
  • synthetic biology, organic computing
  • foundations from neurobiology
  • Turing-Church thesis, physical limits of computation
  • hypercomputation and AI
  • theories of consciousness
  • free will, dualism
  • intelligent agents and game theory
  • direct brain machine interfaces, augmented cognition, mind reading
  • nanotechnology, transhumanism, the singularity
  • simulation hypothesis, virtual worlds
  • quantum mechanics and observation
  • social and intelligent agents, interaction, "laws of robotics"
  • history and literature of AI and artificial agents
Room 48-462 Time Thursdays, 1:45 - 3:15 pm
Tutors: Ilya Mezhirov (mezhirov@iupr.com), Mohammad Reza Yousefi (yousefi@iupr.com)
Exercises: Thursday 15:30 - 17:00 (Starting from 22.11.2012). Room: 48 - 210
Please sign up here for the exercise sessions (necessary for obtaining credit points) [Closed]
Please send homework to hw-2012ws-ffai@iupr.com

Exam Registration: In order to arrange an appointment for the oral exam, please contact secretary@iupr.com. The exam will take place in the second week of April (the exam appointment should also be registered with the Prüfungsamt). 

Important Notice: 
  • The submission deadline for the exercise, writing an essay on the simulation hypothesis, is 24 January 2013. Submissions should be made to the following email address: 
(Please also note that this exercise should be done individually and not in groups)

  • For the proposal preparation exercise, please note that it needs be related to the topics covered in the class. As described in class, the proposal should have the form of a Ph.D. research proposal. Please include at least five references to papers from the relevant literature and be prepared to answer questions about those papers. Have a look at material on the web on how to write Ph.D. research proposals.
  • For the oral exam, please bring a copy of all your exercises, the proposal, and the research papers you based your proposal on.

Lecture 1:

Lecture 2:

Lecture 8:

Lecture 10-11: