The paths of blindfolded walkers trying to walk in a straight line in overcast (blue) and sunlit (yellow) conditions. From Unit 8.2 of Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course.
(Other posts tagged ai-course.)
Here is my fifth participant's report from the Stanford Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course.
1. I'd finished the work before I noticed that, unannounced, the order of the course had been changed from that shown in the originally published outline. Thus units on Representation with Logic, and Planning, taught by Peter Norvig, have come before the originally scheduled units on Hidden Markov Models and Bayes Filters.
2. This change of order probably explains why this week's study felt somewhat disconnected from last week's, a fact emphasised by a change of teacher from Sebastian Thrun to Peter Norvig. Thrun, it has to be said has a less austere and more down-to-earth presence than Norvig, whose delivery style is dry and very concentrated. Underlying this, I think Norvig's material on propositional logic and on mathematical representations of plans is by its nature relatively abstract: and for me this spells trouble, being someone who has always tended to struggle with the abstract.
3. The advice I'd give from a course design point of view is to further strengthen the illustrations as to why these kinds of abstraction matter. The video from which the picture above is taken a good example of this:
4. Secondly this kind of more abstract content needs more rather than less use of "dialogic" check questions, as has been the case in other units of the course. To illustrate this point here are the contents-lists of Units 4 and Units 8. Check-questions are indicated by ?. 12 sets of check questions out of 21 sections is a much more promising ratio than 3 out of 22.
5. During the last week Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig ran an online "office hours" session using a Google Plus "Hangout". I was not around to try to join this, but from Thrun's "We apologize for the large number of people who were denied participation in the online office hours via youtube. We had a lively discussion which was recorded on video - mostly on topics beyond this course (e.g., what are great research topics). We will soon post the video on this site. Apologies again. Technical problems with the Hangout-Youtube link." it looks as if this was a partial success. I think this is a "forgivable" issue, given the very large number of people who will have attempted to take part in it.
6. Next week I hope to find out whether and if yes by how much the participation rate has changed, as measured by the submission of homework for weeks 3 and 4.
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