I signed up for an Artificial Intelligence course the other day. It’s actually a pretty cool program – it’s a free class, but I expect that this means they won’t do anything for you (no grading, no credit). It’s offered out of University of California Berkeley by a guy who worked on the Overmind AI for Starcraft:
Ars Technica: Skynet meets the Swarm: how the Berkeley Overmind won the 2010 StarCraft AI competition
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/skynet-meets-the-swarm-how-the-berkeley-overmind-won-the-2010-starcraft-ai-competition/
As a side note, I signed up for this course on same day as I read a short rant on the internet about how companies have used copyright to lock up all the knowledge of the past 100 years and sell back to us in overpriced textbooks. Some people are just so pessimistic. The anti-copyright crowd can get pretty ridiculous at times – resorting to emotional hyperbole to justify their anti-copyright/pro-piracy stance. The world is actually pretty great and getting better. Back when I grew up, there was no internet. There was no wikipedia, no free online courses, no google, none of the massive amounts of technical data (available for free on the internet) to help me solve coding problems. Back when I grew up, I had to rely on the large set of expensive encyclopedias my parents bought or go to the library – which probably wouldn’t have contained the programming information I needed to get stuff done.
Some people have no sense of how good they’ve got it.