It’s May, and the spring semester is officially over. In true college fashion, it didn’t go out easily. My artificial intelligence course ended on a heavy note, another take-home exam that left everything to the imagination with a simple prompt: design a novel neural network with an architecture that minimizes CO2 emissions. We had 36 hours to turn in our solution, and I used almost every minute of that aside from sleeping and eating. ...
In my artificial intelligence course this semester, we were assigned a research project on a topic of our choosing, focused on a novel approach that improved upon existing research in the domain of AI. Right from the start it was a significant challenge; we were given two weeks to submit a well-defined research proposal without any learning or experience to lean on. I felt like a third grader being asked to invent a new way to solve algebra problems; I’ve heard of it, sure, but I’m missing the fundamentals to build on. ...
My artificial intelligence course this semester has been an interesting one, and the midterm exam is no exception. Rather than testing in-class on what we’ve been learning, our professor gave us a take-home exam that was a practical exercise in A* search algorithms. The problem we were given was to design an A* search algorithm that can find the shortest path a chess knight can take on a 9x9x9 Rubik’s cube to reach a goal at any position on the cube, from any starting position. The algorithm should accommodate the following constraints: ...
AI is making my life very difficult these days. And no, this isn’t a rant about AI taking jobs; I’m talking about the Artifical Intelligence class I’m taking in school this semester. The class itself is very interesting, and the approach our professor takes in teaching is quite challenging, something that until now I’ve felt was largely lacking in other classes. On day 1 of the class we were given an assignment due in two weeks to come up with a topic of interest in AI research and learn enough about it to write a formal research proposal. The proposal had to include a description of some problem within an area of AI and the state of research into that issue, and a plan for improving upon existing research with a novel approach to solving the problem. (I’ll talk more about that project another time.) ...