Algorithm Demonstrations
These demos are provided to help the student visualize the "under-the-hood" processes of algorithms given in the text.
Graph search is discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4 in the 5th edition. It is an abstract way to formulate the solution to a variety problems, and is a fundamental theme in AI. This applet allows the user to specify a goal node and a search strategy, while highlighting the vertices at each step, and showing the open/closed lists.
The edit distance algorithm is discussed in section 4.1 of the 5th edition, and is a canonical example of dynamic programming. The purpose is to determine the number of edit operations to convert one text string into another, providing a sort of "distance" metric between the two strings. It is used in many natural language processing and computational biology tasks.
Natural language understanding (chapter 14, 5th ed.) has long been a core area of interest to AI researchers. This demo is a chat bot that responds to user input in a seeminly intelligent way. It is based on the ALICE system. The ALICE system uses AIML, a markup language for specifying the behavior of an interactive chat bot. For more information on AIML and ALICE, visit http://www.alicebot.org . Admittedly, this is as much for fun as for demonstration!