When I found out about ai-class.com, this fall I was really excited. It is an online Intro to AI course taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig out of Stanford University.  It is free, they are smart and I hadn’t thought about AI problems since undergrad.  Well, it has finally started–and so far so good.

There were a few technical glitches as things got rolling, but that was mostly due to the insanely high demand for the course.  At one point, according to their twitter account, they were getting over 7000 web requests per second.  They now claim to have over 160,000 students registered for the course.  As of today everything seems to be running very smoothly.

When I first heard the numbers regarding how big the course was I wasn’t sure how they were going to administer homework at that scale.  Well, today I turned in my first homework and it is rather cleverly done.  All of the lectures are short video clips (1-6 minutes so far), and at end of each of them they pose some sort of quiz question.  They way that they are presented is pretty clever however, in that they draw out the question in the video via pen and paper and then superimpose an html form on top of it so that you can submit your responses.  For example, here is a multiple choice quiz question:

This ends up working surprisingly well.  So, for the homework assignments they do the same thing.  One of the presenters draws out a question (a maze, or graph, etc) and then asks some questions about it, the form gets superimposed and you submit your answers.  Thus far it has been really great and I highly recommend that anyone who is interested try it out next time the courses are offered.  They also have a Machine Learning course being taught by Andrew Ng as well as a Database course by Jennifer Widom all being done in the same format.