Intro to AI

Classes started up again recently and I’m taking the last university course I’ll ever have to take. There’s not a ton of offerings during spring/summer, but I saw an intro to AI course was being offered and I figured it would be a fun one to end things on.

It’s pretty chill, even despite the condensed schedule that spring and summer classes at my school take on. I think that’s owing to it being a senior-level course (which I find tend to treat students more like adults) and the smallish class size which lets the lectures be very discussion focused. And the fact that it’s the only class I have to focus on doesn’t hurt at all.

I haven’t done a ton in the course yet, mostly just had some interesting discussions about what defines intelligence and decision making. There was also a small project where we had to guide a virtual robot around obstacles to various goals using information from its sensors. It was nothing too crazy, just a little math figuring out vectors and angles but I enjoyed it. Sounds like we should have some other interesting projects coming up, including a tournament style one that’ll have us all designing competing AIs to face off in a game. Whoever designs the winning AI gets an automatic “A” in the course.

I’ve been up to a little bit more recently too, like learning React Native so I can hopefully stand out in the job market a little more. I have some thoughts on that already, but I think I’ll hold off on those until I’m a little further along in that project.