## Academic Integrity
This is an **individual** assignment. You may not collude with any other individual, or plagiarise their work. Students are encouraged to discuss the assignment topic, but _all submitted work must represent the individual’s understanding of the topic_. Students are expected to present the results of their own thinking, problem solving, and coding. Suspected collusion or plagiarism will be dealt with according to [UoM Academic Integrity policy](https://academicintegrity.unimelb.edu.au/). Being an advanced course, we will require students to be fully aware of academic integrity and behave professionally and ethically. If you do not, we will pursue the strongest consequences available to us under the UoM regulations.
Some guidelines to take into account:
1. *Never copy or use another student’s work* (even if the other student “explains it to you first”) and **never give or show your written work to others**. Keep the collaboration _verbal and high-level_, without sharing or showing any code to each other.
2. **Never copy your solution, or part of it, from the web**. An assignment is _not_ an open-source project and it is not acceptable to search for help in web forums or to look for solutions that others have made. The safest way is to directly _**not web search**_ for any solution, but to build them from first-principle yourself. We will use powerful code similarity detection tools for plagiarism detection among submissions in the class and online code. We trust you will be professional and respectful of the teaching staff and the course, **do not let us down!**
3. **Adapting someone else solution does _not_ make it your own work**: _you are meant to generate the solution to the questions by yourself_. You may however reuse code or techniques that are auxiliary to the problem being solved (e.g., code to sort a list of numbers), as long as you understand well the code being reused and document where it comes from.
4. **Reading pseudo-code** for a technique, from text-books, papers, the web, or slides, is completely fine and even expected (e.g., reading and studying the pseudo-code for minimax or A* algorithms).
5. The aim of the course and this project is **your learning**. Everything we are teaching here and you are learning is NOT new and has been in textbooks for decades. Again, our objective is not to discover anything, but to **help you learn** and aquire skills that will be useful for you as a Computer Scientist. So, don’t trick yourself and see how far you can reach by developing solutions to the projects. It is NOT necessary to solve everything or to solve it to perfection, but enough to confidence us that you got the crux of it. 🙂
If you are still unsure on what is acceptable when coding, see my answer to the following question int eh course FAQ: [_In a code assignment/project, how do I make sure I do not go against academic integrity?_](https://docs.google.com/document/d/14giB_eIkWeBwMsBWY0-Tjd6itDV2BBOvwEqcSDyYRZ0/edit?usp=sharing)
**Forum postings on assignment:** Do not ever post any information on the forum that may disclose how to solve a question or what the solution may be. You can only post assignment related questions for clarification on what is being asked, for auxiliary programming tasks (e.g., how to sort a list of numbers in Python), or for generic issues and problems with the techniques study in the course. Posts discussing possible solutions or strategies may directly be considered plagiarism, see above. If in doubt, do not post and ask your question to the lecturer or tutor instead (remember Piazza allows private posting).