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Contents Objective Details
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Objective For this assignment you will prepare brief written statements describing a recent situation where you changed a plan. You should be able to do a good job in two pages or so, depending on how you format your answer. The goals of this assignment are: first, to get you thinking about intelligent activities in the real world in terms of the knowledge and processes required to carry them out; and second, to provide some practice writing about real-world activities. These are key prerequisites for your work later on in the course. Pick a situation where you changed a plan. It's better to pick one that happened in the last week or so, so that you can remember it clearly. (Better still to pick one of the next few times you change a plan, so you can ``observe yourself'' as you make your decision.) It may also make it easier to describe what happened if you changed your plan by learning more information about how the plan would turn out, for example because the original plan had started to go wrong. Nothing about the plan or what happened has to be particularly important, though. You can do a great job on this assignment by considering the most prosaic details. In class I went through this kind of example: I changed my plan about what subway train to take. Briefly summarize the deliberation that you did in this situation. Your answer should describe what the original plan was, what the trigger was that led you to consider a different plan, what other plans you considered, and what factors let you decide on a particular changed course of action. In preparing your answer, think about how the deliberation that you did might reflect general mechanisms for acting flexibly in an uncertain or changing world. That's what the course will be about, and the more you understand these issues the further along you'll be. Next, describe in more detail a couple different pieces of general knowledge that went into the plan you made or the decision-making you did. Don't worry about psychological accuracy, but try to be precise about the content of some information that comes to mind. The following questions may help you to think about what it might take to describe precisely what a piece of knowledge actually is. What regularity in the world were you using? What assumptions might you have to make to apply that regularity? In other words, when could that regularity fail? How might the regularity be explained differently? For example, could the regularity be derived from more abstract principles? Could the regularity be stated more specifically, to apply to a range of cases that is more limited, but still useful?
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