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ICS 462, Artificial Intelligence for Games

Assignment Policy

Assignments will be posted on this website and are due at midnight. Each student starts with with seven (7) grace days (any 24 hour period) of lateness for the entire semester. If you use up all of your grace days, then you cannot turn in anything else late. Exceptions to this will only be made for medical reasons (with a doctor's note) or other serious reasons (e.g. a death in the family -- your own death is not a good reason :-). Also, at no time will late assignments be accepted after a solution set to that assignment has been posted.

Format

Be sure to properly indent and comment your program. Each function, procedure or method should be less than a half page in length. Use mnemonic variable and function/method names.

Plagiarism

You are expected to do all of your assignments yourself. You are free to use any machine that you wish for your assignments. Unless specified otherwise, under no conditions should people share code. It is alright for people to discuss implementation strategies, problems, bugs, and algorithms (in fact this is encouraged), but each person should write his/her own programs and assignments independently. Any sharing of code is plagiarism (see Impermissible Behaviour) and the students involved will be disciplied by reporting them first to the ICS Department and if this is not the first report for the student, then to the Dean of Students (a while ago, the headline story in Ka Leo was the expulsion of some students for cheating).

Late Policy

Each student starts with with seven (7) grace days (any 24 hour period) of lateness for the entire semester. If you use up all of your grace days, then you cannot turn in anything else late. Exceptions to this will only be made for medical reasons (with a doctor's note) or other serious reasons (e.g. a death in the family -- your own death is not a good reason :-). Also, at no time will late assignments be accepted after a solution set to that assignment has been handed out. If solutions are to be handed out, this will be posted on the web page and announced in class when the assignment is handed out.

For example, student Jane Doe may decide to turn in assignment #1 three days late, in which case she only has four grace days left. If she then turns in assignment #2 five days late, she will get a zero for assignment #2 because she does not have enough grace days left (only 4). However, she can still turn in assignment #3 four days late and get full credit for assignment #3. At this point Jane Doe has used up all of her grace days, so she must turn in all of her remaining assignments on time or get zeros. Saturdays and Sundays count as a normal days. For example, if an assignment is due on Thursday, and you turn it in the following Monday, then you have used up 4 grace days. You use up a whole grace day even if you turn in an assignment only 1 minute after the deadline (more than 24 hours late uses up 2 grace days, etc.). If you turn in assignment #1 one minute late and assignment #2 one minute late, then you have used up 2 late days and only have 5 left.

I believe that this is a very flexible late policy. This way, if you are bogged down with work in your other classes during one week, you can postpone work on this class for up to a week. I would suggest that you save your late days for such cases. Furthermore, to encourage people to start assignments early, you will be rewarded by an extra 5% of your grade per day (24 hours) that you turn in your assignment early up to a maximum of 25% (5 days early). Note that if you turn an empty assignment 4 days early, then 0 + 20% of 0 is still 0. On the other hand, it may be to your advantage to turn in an assignment early rather than spend a few more days fine tuning it. If you turn in an assignment twice, I will count only the last version.


David N. Chin / Chin@Hawaii.Edu