Università degli Studi di Pavia

Facoltà di Ingegneria


Artificial Intelligence

A.A. 2025-2026

First Semester

Fri: 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m., Aula 5

Fri: 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m., Aula 5

Lectures & Suggested Readings:

  • Reports of errors in the resources below are always welcome
    1. 2025.10.03 (theory)

      Introduction [pdf]

      Alan Turing (Wikipedia)
      Computer chess (Wikipedia)

      BBC2 Horizon, "Out of Control", 2012 [video]

      D. Silver, et al., "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search", Nature, 529, 2016 [link]

      "AlphaGo - The Movie | Full Documentary", YouTube, 2020 [video]

      "The 35 Year History of ChatGPT", YouTube, 2024 [video]

    2. 2025.10.03 (theory)

      Symbolic Reasoning [pdf]
      Language, schemas and reasoning

      Syllogism (ancient logic) (Wikipedia)

    3. 2025.10.10 (theory)

      Propositional Logic [pdf]
      Boolean algebras, formal propositional language and its semantics, satisfiability, entailment

      Rules of inference, justified by entailment (Wikipedia)

    4. 2025.10.17 (theory)

      Entailment and Algorithms [pdf]
      Turing machine, decision problems, computational complexity, entailment as a satisfiability problem (refutation)

      Automated Symbolic Calculus [pdf]
      Resolution by refutation, soundess and completeness, computational complexity

    5. 2025.10.24 (theory)

      First-order Logic [pdf]
      First-order semantic structures, formal language, variables and quantifiers, satisfaction, entailment

    6. 2025.10.31 (theory)

      Semi-decidability of First-Order logic [pdf]
      Prenex normal form, skolemization, Herbrand's theorem

      First-Order Resolution [pdf]
      Clausal form, unification, resolution method for first-order logic

    7. 2025.11.07 (theory)

      SLD Resolution in First-Order Logic [pdf]
      Horn clauses, SLD resolution, logic programming

      Depth-first search (Wikipedia)
      Breadth-first search (Wikipedia)

      Two Prolog examples that can be executed SWI-Prolog online [link]:
      - Re-definition of Prolog append/3 using the function cons/2 [pl]
      A note [pdf] describing the trace of an example of SLD resolution with append/3
      - Regression to infinity and fairness [pl]

      Minimal Models [pdf]
      Horn clauses, Herbrand model, implicit database
      NOTE: This presentation is an additional resource, provided for completeness.

      Plausible Reasoning [pdf]
      Negation as failure, closed world assumption, deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning

    8. 2025.11.14 (theory)

      Probabilitistic reasoning: representation and inference [pdf]
      Foundations of probability, probability space, random variables, Bayes' theorem, probabilistic inference

      Countable set (Wikipedia)
      Sigma algebra (Wikipedia - see simple set-based examples)
      Probability space (Wikipedia)
      Random variable (Wikipedia)

      "The Banach-Tarski Paradox" (semi-serious but also very informative), YouTube, 2015 [video]

    9. 2025.11.21 (theory)

      Graphical models [pdf]
      Graphical models and factorization, d-separation, inference, computational methods

      GeNIe Modeler (free academic license)
      available from BayesFusion LLC [download]

      Examples for GeNIe Modeler:
      - Alarm.xdsl [model]
      - Alarm_dataset.csv [csv]

    Instructor

    1. Marco Piastra

    2. Contact: marco.piastra@unipv.it


    Kiro

    1. Course info


    Exams

    1. See Faculty website


    Further resources:

    (There are no required textbooks for this course. The following books are recommended as optional readings)

    1. Mordechai Ben-Ari, Mathematical Logic for Computer Science (3rd Edition). Springer, 2012

    2. Kevin P. Murphy, Probabilistic Machine Learning: Advanced Topics, MIT Press, 2023. [Pre-print]


    Links

    1. Artificial Intelligence Reading Group


    1. Artificial Intelligence, A.A. 2024-2025 and before