CS188.1x: Artificial Intelligence

CS188.1x: Artificial Intelligence is an introductory AI course offered by UC Berkeley through the edX MOOC platform. CS188.1x covers roughly the first half of the material in the full on-campus AI course in the span of 12 weeks. Major course topics include search algorithms and heuristics, constraint satisfaction problems, Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning. The course assumes you have taken a first course in algorithms, are familiar with basic data structures, have basic python programming skills and are comfortable with mathematical notation. There isn't any particularly hairy math, but there are a lot of variables and symbols flying around at times. Grading is based on weekly homework assignments that allow unlimited attempts, 3 programming projects and a final exam that allows 1 or 2 attempts per question.

CS188.1x is a direct adaptation of the on-campus AI course. The lecture videos are edited versions of lectures delivered on-campus but instead of seeing the professor, we mostly see the presentation slides themselves with a voice-over from the professor. Direct adaptations of on-campus courses don't always work so well with MOOCs, but this course pulls it off perfectly. The professor speaks clearly and explains topics well. The lecture slides are extremely well-made, with clean text and even a bunch of cute robot and pacman art to go along with the content. The videos are cut down into digestible 5 to 15 minute segments and there are practice comprehension questions following most of the videos that allow you to take a second to reflect and digest the content.

Many courses that have great presentation fall flat when it comes to assignments. This is not one of those courses. The three pacman-themed programming projects are among the best programming assignments I've encountered in any online course. Each project consists of several parts that involve implementing AI algorithms you study in class in the context of a pacman game. The course provides you with all the code you need to run the game, a variety of convenience functions and skeleton code that you have to fill in with algorithms that accomplish the prescribed tasks. The assignments can be frustrating at times, but seeing your code in action with a little pacman racing around gobbling food pellets and ghosts is surprisingly gratifying. It also helps you gain a better understanding of how the algorithms work.

Berkeley CS188.1x: Artificial Intelligence is one of the best MOOCs on the web. It is so good that many students on the forums were eager to take part 2. Unfortunately the professors haven't gotten around to adapting the second half of the full AI course into a MOOC (they did express the desire to do so in the future) but they will give you access to an archived version of the full course upon request.

I give Berkeley CS188.1x 5 out of 5 stars: Excellent.

GREAT COURSE - BUT

@AWFUL , THIS IS THE WORST COURSE EVER

This is a course that is challenging. Without the background you really will need to put the time in.

I worked through the material well after the course completion date. However I have some background in computer science, though have not worked in IT for more than 15 years. I have a degree in computer science and in the past few years, for fun, completed the related edX courses (CS50x, CS.169.1x, CS.169.2x, EECS149.1x, 6.00x, UT.6.01x). The latter (academic theory) served me well.

For anyone wanting to learn about this topic I could not recommend this course more highly! In my opinion it is one of those LANDMARK ON-LINE courses (in the same calibre as the Walter Lewin Physics offerings, though more recent).

While I did not know the material, most of it was vaguely familiar and had been touched on in the other courses I have completed. So I recognised the material and its familiarity made it easier - and I know how crucial that material is to the subject.

This is one of those GREAT COURSES and if you are motivated will deliver huge returns in terms of skills in computer science.

Regards

Peter

Yes, this course was amazing, and I would definitely recommend it to anybody with a solid mathematical background as a sneak into the concepts of AI. The mathematical part was the dimension which I loved the most, because it was the challenging part.

For an experienced programmer, the programming assignments may not be really that demanding: the focus was on figuring out the right spots in the given code templates to fill in code snippets or some small algorithms. That was a nice thing, it was fun, but it was not challenging in the sense that you had to transform algorithms and concepts into your mind and then into your own code. But, that was neccessary, because the computer-assessed program was a Pacman emulation.

The fine thing, as I have mentioned, was the mathematical challenge, and you had to think hard and thouroughly. I have enjoyed that part very much.