AIWG Statement: This course is participating in the proctoring pilot overseen by the Academic Integrity Working Group (AIWG). The purpose of this pilot is to determine the efficacy of proctoring and develop effective practices for proctoring in-person exams at Stanford. To find more details on the pilot or the working group, please visit the AIWG’s webpage.

Communication: We will use Ed for all communications, which you can access via Canvas. CGOE students: please email stanfordonline-gradprograms@stanford.edu if you need general assistance. Make a public Ed post whenever possible. For extra sensitive matters, you can email cs221-staff-aut2627@cs.stanford.edu, which is visible only to the instructors, head CA, course manager, and student liaison.

Video access disclaimer: Video cameras located in the back of the room will capture the instructor presentations in this course. For your convenience, you can access these recordings by logging into the course Canvas site. These recordings might be reused in other Stanford courses, viewed by other Stanford students, faculty, or staff, or used for other education and research purposes. Note that while the cameras are positioned with the intention of recording only the instructor, occasionally a part of your image or voice might be incidentally captured. If you have questions, please contact a member of the teaching team.

Academic accommodations: If you need an academic accommodation, contact the Office of Accessible Education (OAE). The OAE will then prepare an OAE letter with the recommended accommodations. Send this letter to cs221-staff-aut2627@cs.stanford.edu by Friday, Oct 9 (Week 3).

General OAE Guidelines:

• Contact the OAE to obtain an official accommodation letter if you have a health condition that may impact your coursework.
• Only accommodations explicitly stated in your current OAE letter will be accommodated. If you need additional or revised accommodations, you must request an updated letter from the OAE.
• The teaching team will not be able to approve any retroactive accommodation requests.
• If you have any questions or concerns regarding your accommodations, please contact your disability advisor.
• Deadlines and Assignments:
  • Students with OAE letters must request a separate extension for each assignment (you cannot auto-apply your OAE extensions to all assignments).
  • Students with the standard OAE extension accommodation must request an extension before the original due date, as it says in your OAE letter. Retroactive extension requests will not be approved.
  • The teaching team will only approve what is outlined in the OAE letter. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to your OAE advisor.

IMPORTANT: If you plan to use your OAE-approved exam accommodations for a specific assessment, students must provide their letter to cs221-staff-aut2627@cs.stanford.edu by:

• Friday, November 20 (Week 9) at 5:00pm for accommodations on the final exam

You need only submit your letter once per quarter. For urgent OAE-related accommodation needs that arise after the deadline, please consult your OAE advisor. If you are not yet registered with OAE, contact the office directly at oae-contactus@stanford.edu.

Collaboration policy and honor code: Please read Stanford's honor code policy. In the context of CS221, you are free to form study groups and discuss homeworks and projects. However, you must write up homeworks and code from scratch independently, and you must acknowledge in your submission all the students you discussed with. The following are considered to be honor code violations:

• Looking at the writeup or code of another student.
• Showing your writeup or code to another student.
• Discussing homework problems in such detail that your solution (writeup or code) is almost identical to another student's solution.
• Uploading your writeup or code to a public repository (e.g., GitHub) so that it can be accessed by other students.
• Looking at solutions from previous years, either official or written up by another student, or found online.

When debugging code together, you are only allowed to look at the input-output behavior of each other's programs (so you should write good test cases!). We periodically run similarity-detection software over all submitted student programs, including programs from past quarters and any solutions found online on public websites.

AI Policy: Prompting LLMs such as ChatGPT is permitted for low-level programming questions or high-level conceptual questions about the course material, but using them directly to solve the problem is prohibited. We strongly encourage you to disable AI autocomplete (e.g., Cursor Tab, GitHub Copilot) in your IDE when completing assignments (though non-AI autocomplete, e.g., autocompleting function names, is totally fine). We have found that AI autocomplete makes it much harder to engage deeply with the content. See the AI policy (inspired by CS336's).

Honor Code Violations: Anyone violating the honor code policy will be referred to the Office of Community Standards. If you think you violated the policy (it can happen, especially under time pressure!), please reach out to us; the consequences will be much less severe than if we approach you.

Inclusion: The CS221 teaching staff is committed to creating an inclusive and supportive learning environment for all students. Please be respectful to your fellow students, course CAs, and instructors. If you see any problems, please reach out to us early.

Stanford as an institution is committed to the highest quality education, and as your teaching team, our first priority is to uphold your educational experience. To that end we are committed to following the syllabus as written here, including through short- or long-term disruptions, such as public health emergencies, natural disasters, or protests and demonstrations. However, there may be extenuating circumstances that necessitate some changes. Should adjustments be necessary, we will communicate clearly and promptly to ensure you understand the expectations and are positioned for successful learning.

What is this course about? The goal of artificial intelligence (AI) is to tackle complex real-world problems with rigorous mathematical tools. In this course, you will learn the foundational principles and practice implementing various AI systems. Specific topics include machine learning, search, Markov decision processes, game playing, Bayesian networks, and logic.

Prerequisites: This course is fast-paced and covers a lot of ground, so it is important that you have a solid foundation in a number of areas. Here are the basic skills that you need and the classes that teach those skills:

• (Required) Programming CS 106A, CS 106B
• (Required) Discrete math, mathematical rigor: CS 103
• (Required) Probability: CS 109
• (Required) Linear algebra: Math 51
• (Recommended) Algorithms: CS 161
• (Recommended) Systems: CS 107

It is less important that you know particular things (e.g., we don't use eigenvectors in this course even though that's a pillar of any linear algebra course), and more important that you've done enough related things that you feel at ease with it. While it is possible to fill in the gaps, this course does move quickly, and ideally you want to be focusing your energy on learning AI rather than catching up on prerequisites.

Further reading: There are no required textbooks for this class, and you should be able to learn everything from the lecture notes and homeworks. However, if you would like to pursue more advanced topics or get another perspective on the same material, here are some great resources:

• Russell and Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. A comprehensive reference for all the AI topics that we will cover.
• Koller and Friedman. Probabilistic Graphical Models. Covers factor graphs and Bayesian networks (this is the textbook for CS228).
• Sutton and Barto. Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. Covers Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning (free online).
• Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman. The Elements of Statistical Learning. Covers machine learning from a rigorous statistical perspective (free online).

Note that some of these books use different notation and terminology from this course, so it may take some effort to make the appropriate connections.