AISpace2: An Interactive Visualization Tool for Learning and Teaching Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

AIspace is a set of tools used to learn and teach fundamental AI algorithms. The original version of AIspace was written in Java. There was not a clean separation of the algorithms and visualization; it was too complicated for students to modify the underlying algorithms. Its next generation, AIspace2, is built on AIPython, open source Python code that is designed to be as close as possible to pseudocode. AISpace2, visualized in JupyterLab, keeps the simple Python code, and uses hooks in AIPython to allow visualization of the algorithms. This allows students to see and modify the high-level algorithms in Python, and to visualize the output in a graphical form, aiming to better help them to build confidence and comfort in AI concepts and algorithms. So far we have tools for search, constraint satisfaction problems (CSP), planning and Bayesian network. In this paper we outline the tools and give some evaluations based on user feedback.