A bold experiment in distributed education, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" will be offered free and online to students worldwide during the fall of 2011. The course will include feedback on progress and a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, the curriculum draws from that used in Stanford's introductory Artificial Intelligence course. The instructors will offer similar materials, assignments, and exams.I have been doing some preparation for that online class lately. I bought a used copy of an older edition of the textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, and am skimming the early chapters. The site mentions the book is optional though so I doubt it will help much with the work for the course. However, the book has shown some usefulness. Of course, having enough time to continue my studies is next to impossible.
Why take the time to do this course then? Clearly, by taking the course one would learn some of the basics, but what could one hope to accomplish with this knowledge? Many examples exist of what people have already done with a.i. The class site mentions things such as humanoid robots, Google goggles, and self-driving cars. An example closer to every day life would include household electronic devices that have a learner feature to gather information from their environment and then behave differently. Yet, I don't see myself working with cutting edge projects like Google goggles. Those types of projects seem more appropriate for people who could teach this course rather than one who needs to take the course. What kind of application of this learning would be simple enough for me to do but still be of help to some one else or myself? Perhaps applying a rational agent, as the book calls it, to a video project would be something approachable. I've seen a C++ boids example and Blender already has a boids particle system. I'm going to need more time to ruminate on this.
