Exam specimen questions..

Folks

 You may want to note that Qn 11 on the homework, i.e., the one at http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse471/hw2-f06-qn3-4.pdf

is directly from a previous midterm. So it gives you an idea of how the exam questions will look like

Also, I might ask True/False *with explanation* short answer questions such as the ones below:

For each of the following statements below, indicate whether the statement is true or false, and give a brief but precise justification for your answer. Correct answers *with correct justifications* will carry 2points. No points will be awarded for answers without correct justifications.  Example qn: The time and memory requirements of IDA* can be improved by using A* algorithm to do search in individual iterations.    Answer: False. Because A* in the worst case can take as much memory as breadth-first, and thus using A* in the individual iterations will make IDA* require exponential memory (instead of linear memory).   A. A* search does b^(d/2) node expansions when searching a unifrom tree of branching factor b and depth d, using a perfect heuristic.   B. Consider a uniform search tree of depth d and branching factor b, where there are many goal nodes, all of which are uniformly distributed at the leaf level d.  Assuming that memory consumption is not a problem, we are better off using breadth-first search than depth-first search in this scenario.  C. A* search with heuristic h=0 will always have to search the entire tree before finding the optimal solution.   D. Suppose A* search uses an evaluation function f(n) = (1-w) g(n) + w h(n). For any value of w between 0 and 1 (inclusive), A* will terminate and return optimal solution.    E. If h1 and h2 are two admissible heuristics, and h3 is defined as h3(n) = max(h1(n) , h2(n)) , then A* search with h3 is guaranteed to return an optimal solution while expanding as many or fewer nodes than either h1 or h2.