UGS 303: Minds and Machines: Term Paper Worksheet #1

Due at 11:59pm, Friday January 31, 2014 This is the rst of a series of worksheets designed to assist you in the preparation of your nal term paper. You will receive feedback, and your responses to the questions below will contribute 5% to your overall term paper grade. Since the main point of this worksheet is to prepare the ground for a larger piece of work, we will be grading generously. Important! This assignment should be submitted on Canvas as a pdf le. If youre working in Word, you should be able to save your le in this format before submitting: please let us know if you have any problems. Your TA will soon email you your assigned book based on the preferences you have submitted. You should acquire a copy of this book as soon as possible, either through the library or by purchasing it from Amazon or another source. Meanwhile, we will provide an electronic copy of a short selection from your book, so that you may get started at your earliest convenience. Your assignment this week is to read this short selection and respond to the questions in (1)(4) below.1 (1) Briey describe the main ideas or issues addressed in the selection from your book. Note any aspects of the selection that surprised or intrigued you, and explain why. (100-200 words) How does the content of the selection relate to some of the issues arising in the class, e.g. concerning Articial Intelligence, representation, or problem solving? (100-200 words) Identify and describe an argument made in the selection you have read in the book youve been assigned. By an argument, we mean one or more premises, linked together in a way that allows the author to draw a conclusion. The premises might be evidence from observations or experiments, or might be a looser set of intuitions which the author feels the reader is likely to nd persuasive. The conclusion should typically be some claim that, absent the argument, the author expects readers

(2)

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1 If you have already acquired a copy of your book, you may also include material beyond the selection that we provide.

to nd surprising or enlightening. You may choose a short argument made on a single page or a sustained argument made over a large part of the reading. Your description of the argument should include brief descriptions of the premises and conclusion. (100-200 words) (4) Identify two or more sources cited in this selection, or examples of (possibly non-referenced) prior research mentioned in the selection, that would be worth exploring in further detail. What claims or ideas are attributed to these sources, what makes you think they might be worth exploring further, and how do they relate to the main ideas described in your response to the previous question? (100-200 words)