Name:_SOLUTIONS______________________ CSE 473 Midterm Exam Page 1
CSE 473
Spring 2004, Midterm Exam, May 5, 2004, 9:30am – 10:20am
Instructions: Please read through all the questions before you start. We will likely separate the exam
into different pages and grade them individually, so it is important to keep all work localized to the
page with the question; if you use additional sheets, please: one problem per page.
If any problem is underspecified, feel free to make assumptions. Just state and justify your
assumptions. Be neat, concise and clear – you will be graded on the presentation, understandability &
clarity of your answer. The correct answer mixed in with a morass of irrelevant facts will likely
receive a lower score than the answer presented simply.
There are 4 pages with 6 problems totaling 50 points; make sure you have every page!
1. [5 points] Write your name on the top of every page.
2. [10 points] Suppose that h1 and h2 are both admissible heuristics to a search problem which you
need to solve. Is max(h1, h2) also admissible? Prove or provide a counterexample.
Let f = max(h1, h2)
Assume not. Thus there exists some node, n, such that f(n) overestimates the minimum cost of
reaching the goal from n. But then either h1 or h2 must overestimate this same cost. Thus h1 or h2 is
inadmissible, but this violates our assumption that h1 and h2 were admissible.
Name:_SOLUTIONS______________________ CSE 473 Midterm Exam Page 2
3. Consider the following adversarial search trees. Note that underneath the leaves (e.g., nodes c, d, f,
& g in Tree I) we have written the value returned by the heuristic evaluation function.
Tree I Tree II
3 4
a max a
2 b e 3 min b c 4
3
c d f g max 4 d i
5 2 7 3 6
min 2 e h
4
max f g
2 5
a. [2 points] Using min-max search on Tree I, what is the value of node a?
b. [4 points] Suppose Tree I is searched using alpha-beta search in a depth first fashion. E.g.,
if all nodes were explored, they would be visited in alphabetic order. Would alpha-beta
visit all nodes, or would it prune one or more nodes? Answer “no pruning” or for each
node which does get pruned, say “node X pruned immediately after visiting node Y”.
No pruning
c. [2 points] Using min-max search on Tree II, what is the value of node a?
d. [4 points] Answer question b for Tree II.
Node g pruned at f (because the value of b is greater than the value of f so no value of g
could affect the root node’s decision to go left or right). The values discovered at h and i,
on the other hand, do still affect that decision so they cannot be pruned.
Name:_SOLUTIONS______________________ CSE 473 Midterm Exam Page 3
4. [7 points] If Fred is rich, he is happy. But if he’s not rich, then he’s an unhappy liar. If Fred is
either happy or a liar, then he is funny. Fred smells bad when he’s funny. Let R denote that Fred is
rich, H happy, L liar, F funny, and S smells bad. Using propositional logic, can you prove that
Fred is both rich and smelly? Provide either a proof or a succinct argument explaining why no
such proof exists.
This problem fooled almost everyone (sorry!). Many people tried to generate a proof, but either failed or
made a mistake. In fact, R ∧S doesn’t follow from the premises. In other words its not the case that every
truth table which satisfies R => H (and the other premises), is guaranteed to satisfy R ∧S. Put another
way, if one adds the negation of the desired conclusion (i.e. ¬R ∨ ¬S) into the knowledge base and try to
find a contradiction (e.g. using resolution) you will fail. In full first order logic with functions, you may
loop forever trying to generate this contradiction, but since this is a propositional problem you will
eventually do every possible resolution (without getting the contradiction) and know that you can stop.
Unfortunately, checking to make sure you’ve done all possible resolutions, while easy for a computer to
do, is hard for a person to book keep. So a better strategy is to use DPLL to try and find a satisfying
assignment for the KB + negated goal. If you find a satisfying assignment, then clearly there can’t be a
contradiction.
The first step is to convert to clausal form, just as in resolution, but recall that with resolution we add each
newly resolved clause to the clause set. In contrast, with DPLL, the set of clauses gets smaller over time
(and clauses tend to get shorter). The objective is either no clauses (which denotes a satisfying
assignment) or the presence of an empty clause (which means that the original set o clauses was
unsatisfiable).
We start with the following knowledge base:
1. R => H which we can write in clausal form as: (¬R ∨ H)
2. ¬R => (¬H ∧ L) thus (R ∨ ¬H) ∧
3. (R ∨ L)
4. (H ∧L) => F thus (¬(H ∧L) ∨ F) thus (¬H ∨ ¬L ∨ F)
5. F => S thus (¬F ∨ S)
6. Let’s now add the negated goal (¬R ∨ ¬S)
Let’s write this on one line:
(¬R ∨ H) (R ∨ ¬H) (R ∨ L) (¬H ∨ ¬L ∨ F) (F ∨ S) (¬R ∨ ¬S)
F is pure so we set it to true (This is called pure literal elimination + it gives
(¬R ∨ H) (R ∨ ¬H) (R ∨ L) (¬R ∨ ¬S)
Now L & S are pure, so L := true, S := false.
(¬R ∨ H) (R ∨ ¬H)
At this point, DPLL has to start searching, suppose it sets R := true then we have
(H)
Since H is pure, we know it must be true, we delete the clause, and we have no more clauses.
This means that {F=true, L=true, S=false, R=true, H=true} is a satisfying assignment for the KB+negated
goal. So there isn’t a contradiction, so R ∧S doesn’t follow from the KB (indeed S=false).
Name:_SOLUTIONS______________________ CSE 473 Midterm Exam Page 4
5. [7 points] Encode the sentence “Politicians can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the
people some of the time, but they can’t fool all of the people all of the time” Use the following
predicates: P(x) is true when x is a politician. H(y) is true when y is a human being (i.e. a
person). T(t) is true when t is a time. F(x, y, t) is true when x fools y at time t.
[∀p ∃h ∀t (P(p) ∧ H(h) ∧ T(t)) => F(p, h, t)] ∧
[∀p ∃t ∀h (P(p) ∧ H(h) ∧ T(t)) => F(p, h, t)] ∧
[∀p ∃h ∃h (P(p) ∧ H(h) ∧ T(t)) => ¬F(p, h, t)]
I think this is the best answer, but other answers are also
possible, e.g. switching the order of the quantifiers (∃h ∀t) in
the first line and the order of (∃t ∀h) in the second line. These
switches change the meaning of the overall sentence, but one
might argue legitimately that the meaning matches that of the
English sentence. It’s interesting that logic forces you to be
more precise than English (e.g, distinguishing between there is
one gullible person who is fooled time after time, or whether
each time someone (maybe a different person each time) falls for
the lie.
Name:_SOLUTIONS______________________ CSE 473 Midterm Exam Page 5
6. Suppose that you decide to create an startup that will produce a filter-service for Internet Service
Providers so that their customers (who enable your filter) will be guaranteed1 never to browse to
an X-rated Website. Having just taken CSE 473, you decide to build the filter using machine
learning techniques. Your first step is to
a. [4 points] Describe the problem of identifying adult sites as a function approximation
problem. What is the function you wish to approximate?
F: website-attributes ‡ {adult, ¬adult} or
F: websites ‡ {adult, ¬adult}
b. [5 points] What features of Web pages would you choose to use as attributes for describing
the domain of this function? (This choice is much like the choice of features when
building a heuristic function in a game-playing program)
There are many possible answers here, and indeed choice of features (while the single most
important decision in building a ML system) is an art, not a science. Here are a few:
• Keywords (e.g. is the word “sex” present)
• Presence of images (perhaps of a certain size. Perhaps with certain hues (skin tone) or
certain features (if one had a good computer vision system).
• Linkage structure (does the site point to other known adult sites, to pages that have
certain characteristics (e.g. keywords or images, or…) or do other known adult sites
point to this one.)
1
You’ll only want to offer this guarantee, if you can really get your filter to work perfectly, of course.
