Want To Learn Artificial Intelligence? Good.

In a little more than a month, tens of thousands of people around the world will attend a class on Artificial Intelligence at Stanford. Registration for this class is still open for both class ‘tracks’. The “basic” track is simply watching lectures and answering quizzes, or a slightly more advanced version of MIT OpenCourseware or Khan Academy. The “advanced” track is the full class, requires homework and exams, and aspires to Stanford difficulty.

With thousands of people taking this class, there’s bound to be a few study groups popping up around the web. The largest ones we’ve seen are /r/aiclass on Reddit and the stack overflow style aiqus. The most common reply to ‘what language should I learn from this class?’ is Python, although there’s an online code repo that has the text’s working code in Lisp, Java, C++ and C#.

If AI doesn’t float your boat, there are two more classes being taught from Stanford this fall: machine learning and introduction to databases. Any way you look at it, you’re getting to take a class from one of the preeminent instructors in the field for free. Do yourself a favor and sign up.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in. You can stop now.

39 thoughts on “Want To Learn Artificial Intelligence? Good.

    1. Dont worry everybody….Hollywood is incapable of coming up with any new original screenplays anymore….before you know it theyll be making “2101 a space odyssey” then the kids will know HAL is not just a Jack Black character.

  1. I’ve signed up as this should prove really interesting.

    Helps of course that after finishing my Comp Sci BSc last year I was kicking myself for not taking the AI related units such as Genetic Algorithms.

    Hopefully this’ll also give me some ideas and leave hooks as to where I can dabble with fuzzy logic (a unit I did take), as AI seems like the perfect field for that.

    1. Don’t worry, GAs sound cooler than what they actually are… they’re nothing more than a guided random search through the entire search space.

      Mostly game related but take a look at aigamedev.com if you’re interested in AI.

  2. Whoa… This is great! I’ve signed in for the advanced. Just one problem, this isn’t the only class I’m taking.

    This is what I guessed it would be like. Signing in for classes in America, without going there… Watching lectures online.

    I can’t wait! see you all in class, guys.

  3. Holy crap this will be boring as hell. If you think learning artificial intelligence at university involves something fun like building some sort of awesome robot that can take over the world you’re delluding yourself.

    Im doing a computer science/engineering double degree and I did AI in the previous semester. It is boring and one of the dreaded core courses that you have to do in Computer Science. You mostly learn about tree search traversal algorithms such as the travelling salesman problem.
    The only coding that was fun was that we programmed an algorithm to play checkers. Sounds more fun than it actually is. All youre doing is assigning scores to pieces and adding them up to compare which move is best.

    Most of what you learn is theory based and totally boring. If I were to pick some course for some person to do for free it’d be some kind of programming course where you actually program and not waste time about theory.

    1. Then you should of course feel free not to sign up. Just because you got nothing out of it doesn’t mean it is a waste of time for anyone else.

      Oh, and theory is what differentiates the Java jockeys from real engineers and scientists. People who find theory boring simply lack the intellect and imagination required to see the applications that sit behind the theory.

    2. I’ve had the same boring courses so I have felt your pain sir. Hopefully these courses aren’t the same ones we’ve suffered through. I’m too busy to sign up for these myself, so I guess I’ll never really know.

    3. @vtl: The subject is not boring or not. It’s how you use the knowledge acquired. Just like the verilog classes we took once I was back a student. Some took the boring way doing adders and muls, filters just to get past it, and some (incl. me) teamed up, picked an FPGA dev board and made a small RISC CPU + assembler for it, and that was MUCH more fun.

  4. Einstein said “God doesn’t play dice” but much of mother nature can be emulated with a random number generator. Are there “Physics Foibles”? Numbers are the Supreme Court of science. What would Godel say?

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