AI class. Done and dusted

Overall the AI class has been a great experience for me. I have learned so many concepts that I had never even imagined and my take on problem solving has been forever altered. The logic of ones and zeros that I've always worked with in my professional career has been transformed into a logic which suggests that the logical course is clearly the one with the maximum probable likelihood of success. This in itself is a more Spock-like analysis and, for me, the closer we can get to Star Trek the better things will be for everyone.

Clearly academia in a vacuum is a sad and lonely thing. It doesn't matter how clever a principle is or how wonderful a solution is, if the smartie pants that came up with the idea cannot communicate that effectively to the people that have to do the work then the process is a waste of time. Books of knowledge that gather dust because they are too esoteric to read may as well be burned.

Sebastian Thrun has a gift for teaching that enthuses and inspires his audience and has made the AI class experiment a phenomenal success. Many thousands of people today have seen a new way of doing things that will open up this relatively closed science to even more hobbyists than before. Remember that it was the hobbyists that sparked the computer revolution of the 1970's and 1980's.

Searching for AI related information on the web, the name of Peter Norvig comes up time after time and now, thanks to this course, thousands who would otherwise be ignorant of his taste in wacky shirts will be able to understand and use that knowledge in their own experiments.

I sincerely hope that this sort of course becomes mainstream and that not only should courses on high-tech and esoteric subjects like AI become available but that every university in the world should provide such fantastic teaching to everyone in every subject.

Until now, academia has been a closed and elitist environment with standards for entry that were drastically limited by the physical resources of the organisation. Now a course with 150000 applicants is possible and even if only 10% finish, that means 1500 heads full of new ideas for the betterment of mankind.

My congratulations and thanks go to Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig and the rest of the Stanford team for this wonderful opportunity.