Looks like I have two months to brush up on my probability and linear algebra. Could anyone who's read AIMA or taken the Stanford course suggest which topics I should (de)emphasize?
I can't wait to see how well this works out. If the results are good it could put another nail in the coffin for classroom only education.
Although I foresee a lot of those that register for the free online course dropping out. Most people won't put a high enough value on a free class, especially if they're not getting credit.
I agree with your assesment that many (most?) will sign up without truly giving it the effort required. I wish it was $20 - some token amount. To extrapolate metrics on 'paid' users vs free users on most freemium apps, the vast majority of people won't even open their wallet for a dollar. If you aren't serious enough to pay $20 for the class, you aren't serious enough to buy the book and do the homework.
I'm really glad it's free. Where I live, $20 pays a month of lunch or public transportation. Even if it were $1 or $0.01 it would exclude people without international credit cards.
> Most people won't put a high enough value on a free class, especially if they're not getting credit.
Both Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are Very Important Persons in Google (Google Fellow / Google Director). This is basically a free diploma to be put in the CV for any Google wanna-be engineer, if they can make it. I doubt even credit would be more important than it.
Well, even if you're not a Google wanna-be it's pretty cool. I signed up (for an update when registration is open), but I'm afraid I won't have the time to properly devote to it as well. If it's free of charge learning there is a tendency to let other things get in the way vs. prioritizing it because you paid full tuition price. At least that was my experience in college with the trust fund kids vs. the people that were working three jobs to scrape tuition together. There may be some selection bias there though.
Anyone who's interested in joining a study group, I've added a Google Doc spreadsheet: http://goo.gl/cbzUL.
Based on the lack of comments here it's hard to tell what the overall interest level is for a study group, but personally I've found them to be quite rewarding.
As the course's start date approaches we'll see how many people have signed up and take it from there.
It might turn out a better alternative to doing this in an ad hoc manner to use one of the online study groups (like OpenStudy, for instance). Personally, I haven't any experience with them yet, but I'm sure there are others who have and can shed some insight.
What is the big deal? If you really wanted to learn AI there are plenty of books and free resources online to do it. Why wait to learn until somebody offers a free course online?
Some people seem to be very excited by this. You don't have to wait until October. Andrew Ng's course on Machine Learning@Stanford is available for free on iTunes University (it also seems to be on YouTube). Do note that ML is a subset of AI. Also, my experience has been that the assignments and exams constitute a large fraction of the learning in a course. For that, you'll have to wait until October :)
It might be easier to take 229 (Machine Learning) after 221 (this class), since 221 is intended to be a lead-in. and less mathematically rigorous. It's still definitely worth a look but may be hard to understand without a background in algorithm design.
This is total awesomeness for the really motivated to learn. I don't think I'll have the time... although, maybe this is a good enough reason to quit my job. This is certainly an indication of what the future will bring for education. I hope other universities/professors do the same...
Then you didn't live in a building full of 200+ proto-adults, many of whom lacked bsaic cleaning skills, long enough... or maybe I just lived in one too long :)
