COMPUTER LABORATORY 2 ORAL QUESTION

ANSWER
Set I

1. What is uninformed search method?

 Uninformed search, also called blind search, is a class of general

purpose search algorithms that operate in a brute-force way. 

 The term uninformed means that the search strategies have
no additional information about States beyond that provided
in the problem definition. 

 All they can do is generate successors and distinguish a goal
state from a non-goal state. 


2. List various Uninformed search strategies

  BFS 
  Uniform cost search 
  DFS 
  Depth limited search 
  Iterative deepening search 
 Bidirectional search 


3. What is BFS?

 BFS Stands for “Breadth First Search”. 


 BFS starts traversal from the root node and then explore the
search in the level by level manner i.e. as close as possible
from the root node. 

 Breadth First Search can be done with the help of queue

i.e. FIFO implementation. 







4. What is DFS?

 DFS stands for “Depth First Search”. 


 DFS starts the traversal from the root node and explore the
search as far as possible from the root node i.e. depth wise. 

 Depth First Search can be done with the
help of Stack i.e.LIFO implementations. 


5. Explain Various Uninformed search strategies

 Breadth First Search (BFS): is a simple strategy in which the

root node is expanded first, then all the successors of the root
node are expanded next, then their successors, and so on.
Fringe is a FIFO queue. 


 Uniform Cost Search (UCS): modifies BFS by always expanding
the lowest cost node on the fringe using path cost function g(n)
(i.e. the cost of the path from the initial state to the node n).
Nodes maintained on queue in order of increasing path cost. 


 Depth First Search (DFS): always expands the deepest node in the
current fringe of the search tree. Fringe is a LIFO queue (Stack). 


 Depth Limited Search (DLS): The embarrassing failure of DFS in
infinite state spaces can be alleviated by supplying DFS with a
predetermined depth limit l, that is nodes at depth l aretreated
as if they have no successors. 


 Iterative Deepening Depth First Search (IDS): is a general strategy
often used in combination with depth first tree search that finds
the best depth limit. It does this by gradually increasing limit first
0, then 1, then 2, and so on until the goal is found. 
  Bidirectional Search (BS): The idea behind bidirectional search
is to simultaneously search both forward from the initial state
and backward from the goal state, and stop when the two
searches meet in the middle. Here there are two fringes, one
that maintains nodes forward and other that maintains nodes
backward. Each fringe is implemented as LIFO or FIFO depends
on the search strategy used in the search (i.e. Forward=BFS,
Backward=DFS). 


6. What is informed search?

 Informed search strategy is one that uses problem-specific

knowledge beyond the definition of the problem itself. It can
 find solutions more efficiently than uninformed strategy. 
  Best-first search 
  Heuristic function 
  Greedy-Best First Search(GBFS) 
  A* search 
 Memory Bounded Heuristic Search. 


7. What is difference between BFS and DFS

BFS DFS
BFS is slower than DFS DFS is faster than BFS
Data structure used is Queue Data structure used is Stack
FIFO LIFO
Requires more memory Require less memory
Backtracking is not possible Backtracking is possible
8. Time complexity of uninformed search

9. What is context awareness?

 Context-awareness is considered to be the key challenge for

making mobile devices aware of the situation of their users
and their environment. 
 This research area focuses on the management of context
information in pervasive computing environments where
people are surrounded by and interacting with many
unobtrusive networked devices. 

10. What is context management

 It's a dynamic process that uses 'subjects' of data in one

application, to point to data resident in a separate application
also containing the same subject. Context Management allows
users to choose a subject once in one application, and have all
other applications containing information on that same
 subject 'tune' to the data they contain, thus obviating the
need to redundantly select the subject in the varying
applications 


11. General architecture of context management system?

12. Context management System for Profile Translation

13. What is A*?

 In computer science, A* (pronounced as "A star") is a

computer algorithm that is widely used in path finding and
graph traversal, the process of plotting an efficiently
traversable path between multiple points, called nodes. 

 The A* algorithm combines features of uniform-cost search
and pure heuristic search to efficiently compute optimal
solutions 


14. Formula of A *

 A* algorithm is a best-first search algorithm in which the

cost associated with a node is, 
f(n) = g(n) + h(n),
 Where g(n) is the cost of the path from the initial state to node
n

 h(n) is the heuristic estimate or the cost or a path from node

n to a goal. 

15.What is heuristic function

 The heuristic function is a way to inform the search about

the direction to a goal. It provides an informed way to guess
which neighbor of a node will lead to a goal.
 There is nothing magical about a heuristic function. It must
use only information that can be readily obtained about a
node. 

 The heuristic function h(n) tells A* an estimate of the
minimum cost from any vertex n to the goal .






16. What is Open and Closed list in A *

 The fringe list, often called the "open list", is a list of all
locations immediately adjacent to areas that have already
been explored and evaluated (the closed list). 

 The closed list is a record of all locations which have
 been explored and evaluated by the algorithm. 
  Open List - A list of all the nodes visited but not yet explored. 
 Closed List - A list of all the nodes visited and completely explored. 


17. What is unification algorithm?

 Unification is an algorithmic process of solving equations

between symbolic expressions. Depending on which expressions
(also called terms) are allowed to occur in an equation set 

 A solution of a unification problem is denoted as a
substitution, that is, a mapping assigning a symbolic value to
 each variable of the problem's expressions. 
 For example, using x,y,z as variables, 

 the singleton equation set cons(x; cons(x; nil)) = cons(2; y) is a

syntactic first-order unification problem that has the
substitution x 7! 2; y 7! cons(2; nil) as its only solution. 


18. What is Bayes theorem?

 Bayes' theorem the probability of an event, based on

conditions that might be related to the event. The
mathematical statement of Bayes’ theorem is 
19.What is naive bayes theorem

 Bayes theorem provides a way of calculating the posterior

probability, P(c|x), from P(c), P(x), and P(x|c). Naive Bayes
classifier assume that the effect of the value of a predictor (x) on
a given class (c) is independent of the values of other predictors.
This assumption is called class conditional independence. 

 P(c|x) is the posterior probability of class (target) given

 predictor (attribute). 
 P(c) is the prior probability of class. 

 P(x|c) is the likelihood which is the probability of predictor
 given class. 
 P(x) is the prior probability of predictor. 


20. What is pervasive computing?

 Pervasive computing (also called ubiquitous computing) is

 the growing trend towards embedding microprocessors. 
 The words pervasive and ubiquitous mean "existing everywhere". 

 The aim of Pervasive Computing is for computing available
wherever it's needed. It spreads intelligence and
 connectivity to more or less everything. 


21. Properties of pervasive computing

 Decentralisation. All computing is done by basic, small devices

that are unintelligent, yet communicate in an open
community where the structure of connections changes
dynamically. 

 Diversification. Devices are small and special purpose,
supplying a few, or even just one type of information. 

 Connectivity. Dumb devices can produce powerful and
intelligent behaviour, if multiple devices act in parallel linked
 by an underlying infrastructure eg. the Internet. 
 Simplicity 


22. What is User Profile?

 A user profile is a visual display of personal data associated with

a specific user, or a customized desktop environment. A profile 

refers therefore to the explicit digital representation of a

person's identity. A user profile can also be considered as the
computer representation of a user model.

23. What is minmax algorithm?

 Minimax is a kind of backtracking algorithm that is used in

decision making and game theory to find the optimal move
for a player, assuming that your opponent also plays
optimally. It is widely used in two player turn based games
such as Tic-Tac-Toe, Backgamon, Mancala, Chess, etc. 

 In Minimax the two players are called maximizer and
minimizer. The maximizer tries to get the highest score
possible while the minimizer tries to get the lowest score
possible while minimizer tries to do opposite. 
 




24. What is k mean clustering?

 K-means clustering is a method of vector quantization,

originally from signal processing, that is popular for cluster
analysis in data mining. 

 k-means clustering aims to partition n observations into k
clusters in which each observation belongs to the cluster with
the nearest mean, serving as a prototype of the cluster 

25. Formula for k means