Now that I seem to be in recovery from yesterday's post -- and past the 48 hour brain damage danger zone -- lets get back to pursuing more edifying subjects.
I signed up to take the Artificial Intelligence class being offered online (as an experiment in monetizing the extended educational experience) by Stanford University. Anyone can join -- at least until it starts next week -- and over 130 THOUSAND folks have. So it oughta be interesting.
To try to get a flavor of what I've gotten myself into I started reading the book and looking through the demo code. I'm posting my notes for all to wonder at. The book is pretty well written but the questions at the end of each chapter seem to be from the Advanced, not the Introductory, class, as they refer to topics that are only barely mentioned in the text. Given that I dropped out of more CS classes than I completed, 35 years ago, I'm having trouble groking the required level of "proof" and "show that" requested. Hopefully the video lectures and actual homework assignments will be a bit more illuminating.
Looking at the code takes me right back to the days of trying to understand the work of my professional peers with advanced degrees. I posit that the sets ComputerScientist and SoftwareEngineer are Almost Disjoint. Therefore what looks like a really swell algorithm in a text book may need a bit of patching for the real world. I try to address some of these "issues" in my notes on specific code blocks. My natural tendency is to re-write everything I come across -- Hi Brian -- so I have to be careful. And bite my tongue.
In any case I can always drop down a notch to the Basic level which has no feedback requirements and just go along for the ride. But for now I hope to keep posting what may be useful information...don't touch that dial.
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