COMP3411 Artificial Intelligence

Term 1, 2026

Week 1 Tutorial

  1. Introductions

    Introduce yourselves, get to know your tutor

  2. What is Intelligence?

    Define in your own words:

    1. intelligence
    2. artificial intelligence
    3. agent
    4. rationality
    5. logical reasoning

  3. Current State of the Art

    Pick a few tasks from the following list, or others of your own choosing, and do a Web search to discover to what extent they can currently be performed by computers:

    1. Play games like Chess, Go, Bridge or Poker.
    2. Trade in stocks, bonds or crypto.
    3. Translate (written or spoken) English into Chinese in real time.
    4. Discover and prove new mathematical theorems.
    5. Compose a piece of music, or a popular song.
    6. Create images or visual artworks.
    7. Create a movie or a short video, with characters and voicing.
    8. Write an intentionally funny story.
    9. Give competent legal advice in a specialized area of law.
    10. Teach or tutor a student in physics, history or a foreign language.
    11. Play a game of table tennis, volleyball, soccer or other sports.
    12. Drive autonomously in a crowded urban environment.
    13. Perform a complex surgical operation.

    For the currently infeasible tasks, try to find out what the difficulties are and predict when, if ever, they will be overcome.

  4. PEAS Description

    Choose a few of the tasks from Part 3 and, for each task, develop a PEAS description of the task environment, characterize the environment according to the properties given in lectures, and select a suitable agent type (or, discuss the relative merits of the different agent types presented in lectures).

  5. LLM's

    To what extent are predictive models like ChatGPT really intelligent? What are their strengths and limitations?

  6. Evolution

    Why would evolution tend to result in systems that act rationally? What goals are such systems "designed" to achieve?

  7. Universal AI

    Do you believe human-level AI will ever be achieved? Why? Why Not? Are you persuaded by any of the commonly posed objections to AI? What obstacles or challenges still remain?

  8. Societal Impact

    What consequences, challenges and potential dangers are likely to arise from progress in AI and Robotics – for the economy, employment, environment, privacy, safety and security, and society in general?