On this page are the PDF slides containing our course notes/presentations for the course we are offering at European Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) in 2014
To appear as they are presented during the week of the course.
A rough description of the syllabus is available in our original proposal for the course, although the actual implementation has evolved somewhat since then.
We will be using a piece of driving simulator software during the course for an interactive demonstration that will require some fraction of you to have it installed on your own notebook computers. The software is the OpenDS system from the German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).
We've written up some installation instructions for running it on a Mac. The process for Linux is similar.
The basic idea for all systems (Windows included) is that you need a recent version of MySQL with no password for the root account installed on your machine. Then you need a recent version of Java. We tested these out for a Mac.
Step 1. Install mysql.
Go to the MySQL download page and download the Mac version.
You should let it install in /usr/local/mysql. Do not set a "root" password for the internal "root" account of the database (which is inside the DB, not the system root which should always have restricted access!!!).
When you restart the machine, the server should be automatically started.
You should test it out by going to a terminal and typing
> /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -uroot
It should give you a mysql prompt. Then you can type:
mysql> use mysql;mysql> show tables;
And it should give you a long list of administrator tables.
Then, AND THIS IS IMPORTANT, type
mysql> create database simulator;
type "exit" to exit.
Step 2. Install a recent JDK.
This is not a huge deal, if you already have 1.6 or higher, it's OK, but here's the link.
Step 3. Download and unzip the simulator.
Get it from here. It's a special version modified slightly just for this course.
Unzip it from the terminal with:
> tar xzvf DrivingSimulator-mac.tar.gz
(Sometimes MacOS removes the gzip compression during download, it seems, so omit the "z" from the above if you see that.)
Step 4. Set up the database table.
The rest of the steps take place within the "DrivingSimulator" directory created when you unzipped the file.
This is how you create the results table in MySQL.
>/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -uroot < create_table.sql
Step 5. Do a test run of the simulator. NEW! Linux and Windows command is different, see below.
>java -cp lwjgl.jar:Simulator.jar de.dfki.carmina.simulator3D.main.Simulator
It will bring up the DFKI logo. Choose the highest resolution it gives you but NOT full screen mode. It should pause and then give you a dialog box with a menu and a text field.
Make up a unique player name like "test" or something and enter that into the text box. Then click on "driverTask" and then "driverTaskE" in the file listing. Then click OK.
It should bring up the driver task, which we'll explain in class. Click around with your arrow keys to move one of the bars. You should do this for 10 or 15 seconds (or more) after it has passed the "START" flag. If it crashes or produces "JasperReports" exceptions in the terminal, the root account has likely not been set to an empty password.
Press "escape" and tell it OK in order to quit.
Step 6. Extract the test data. NEW! Linux and Windows command is different, see below.
If you named your test player "test", this is how you would extract the data you created when you moved the bar around. From the terminal, inside the DrivingSimulator directory, type:
> ./exportdata.sh test > test_output.txt
You will have a table in a filename called "test_output.txt". Normally, you'd replace "test" with a username of your own, when we actually use the simulator, and you'd email the file to us for our analysis. We'll talk about this in class.
The process is analogous for Linux. However, in Linux, you would usually use your favorite package manager to find the mysql-server package. Also download a recent openjdk via the package manager. You can even do it without the package manager using most of the above instructions, if you want.
You can get Windows versions of the underlying software from the links we gave above.
There are two IMPORTANT details to note for both Windows and Linux. The first is, make sure (as for Mac) that there is an account called "root" and it has no password -- this is only interior to the database, NOT for the system (!!!). (If you want to set a password there is a settings file in OpenDS that has to be changed, and we'll show this in class, but this should not be necessary unless you are running a web server from your laptop.)
For getting Linux to ACTUALLY do things without a root password, first run these commands from a prompt.
sudo service mysql stopsudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables --skip-networking &The second detail is that the command to run is slightly different:
> java -cp Simulator.jar de.dfki.carmina.simulator3D.main.Simulator
The reason is, OpenDS on Linux and Windows shouldn't require a special version of the game engine that current versions of Macs do. (Not fully attested for the most recent Windows versions.)
NEW! About extracting the data on Windows and Linux: The included "exportdata.sh" doesn't work on Linux. You need to download exportdata-linux.sh and run it instead with
> chmod u+x exportdata-linux.sh> ./exportdata-linux.sh test > test_output.txt
...with "test" replaced by the player name you entered into the simulator.
Unfortunately, we don't own a copy of Windows, so we can't actually simulate this on a Windows environment. You need to find a way to extract the data using the following SQL commands in whatever environment MySQL provides under Windows:
use simulator;select * from car_experiment_results where subject_name = 'test';
And then you need to find a way to dump the data that should appear out into a text file. This would work in any environment, but it should be easier to use the scripts for Mac and Linux.
We don't require you to have read these before the course, but here are some interesting background documents that might tell you where we're coming from.
Feel free to use these materials (except the OpenDS simulator, which belongs to the DFKI) as long as you give us the appropriate credit by mentioning us and (even better) giving a link back to our current home pages (Asad Sayeed and Vera Demberg). Contact us (spam avoidance: we will leave it to you to figure out how, but our home pages have very big clues) if you have any comments/requests/corrections that you want to make.