By Afref Fetter 5 months ago Completed

Prior experience in the field: The AI (robotics) course on Udacity.

Like:
The course material was presented in an easy to absorb manner. It was engaging and you felt like learning more.

The robot cartoons. They helped me stay focused - and interested!

Professors' enthusiasm and knowledge. Explained stuff in easy terms.

Questions - tested concepts well more often than not.

Dislike:
Forums weren't very interactive.

Multiple choice questions can get irritating when you're not very clear with certain concepts.

The projects can be very frustrating to tackle at times, but the forums usually have helpful pointers.

It would be good to try Udacity's course before this one, just because it would make this a little easier.

The course had a lot more work than I expected, and the work was all much more helpful in internalizing teh concepts. This course is the best AI course on the web right now.

By Chad Colgur from Vancouver, British Columbia 5 months ago Completed

Prof. Klein is an engaging lecturer. I really enjoyed his enthusiasm for the material.

I expected an environment similar to the other more recent MOOCs but edX is quite different and in a good way. The discussions were organized lecture by lecture, problem by problem and that seemed to focus the discussions. It certainly helped me to find the discussion(s) relevant to my questions.

I've taken several AI classes: ML from Prof Ng, Robotic Car with Prof. Thrun, and Intro. to AI with Prof. Thrun and Prof. Norvig. Some of the material was familiar but the focus on adversarial scenarios in this course was fun. The others kind of survey the field. This one did survey but with an eye on how to program a game. The game was the running example and it was fun to think of the problems that way.

You should probably have seen Python before taking this course. You really don't need any background in probability to grasp reasoning under uncertainty. High-school algebra and a bit of programming experience will take you a long way in this course.

By Manoj Kumar from Bangalore, Karnataka 5 months ago Completed

This is one of the Best Course I have taken so far.
Some points why this course is superb -
1. Awesome Projects - To augment the theory, the course is coupled with projects to apply different concepts of AI and I think that is the best part of course. It not only makes the course really enjoyable but also helps in grasping difficult concepts. The moment when Pacman defeats the ghosts with your algo, this gives you strength to carry amid hectic job schedules. Projects are very well organized with you having to full only the blanks which are relevant to concepts in class.
2. Great Instructors and discussion forums - Dan and Peter they are great instructors. They elucidate the abstract concepts very well and augment as much as possible with practical illustrations. This makes things really easy to understand. And discussion forums were very vibrant and fertile ground of ideas.You get stuck somewhere, post a question and within an hour there are many people to help you out.

By iAMSAM from Washington, D. C., Washington, D.C. 4 months ago Completed

Dan Klein ranks among the best professors I've listened to. I give high ranks to people such as MIT Biology Professor Eric Lander (via MIT Open Courseware).

Prof Klein brings incredible enthusiasm, energy and clarity to difficult concepts. The concepts such as Markov Decision Processes, BDS, DFS and more are applicable to many disciplines.

There is a book that is suggested but not required. Dan Klein's lectures were much clearer and easier to follow than the text.

The problems are hard, but there is much to learn by attempting them.

The video quality is good. The pdf's are downloadable.

I prefer the interface of EdX over Coursera. But, I would like to see an entire lecture downloadable in one fell swoop instead of 7-10 small snippets. It would be nice to take into account an interface that would be workable on an iPad.

And to bring intelligence and probability to course evaluations we see here that every review of more than 35 is at or near 5/5 stars, save one. That lets you know that even something terrific is not likely to garner 100/100 points. All minds are not likely to think alike and some are far outliers.

By alestar from Ciudad de la habana 5 months ago Completed

I´m not very experience in this type of course, but this is by far the most well focus and efficient course for e-learning that I ever take. For starters, it has the most incredible graphic designer in the presentations to make it interesting, semantically rich and by the way super fun. You can actually learn such complicated things with only a math background and a little POO experience (although that last one is not strictly necessary) and beginning to create your own intelligence agents to do hardcore stuff. The professors are super niece and devoted. The TA´s member super worried about correct answers, spoilers, trolls, and in general the dynamic of the forum to go in the right way. The community of students has contributed as well in such a productive way. It´s seem to me that this course has its own soul and you can feel everyone’s enthusiasms. You have all the resources at your feet. Even for me who has and a 4Kb/s dial up connection and live in CUBA (that is known for the internet difficulties), I was able to completed thanks to the EDX platforms and de Wiki from CS188.1x.

By PavelKrupets 5 months ago Completed

Very good course!

1) Lectures + Review questions are awesome to help learning the subject
2) Homework is well designed to help get deeper understanding of the subject
3) Projects are fun!!!

If you invest some time and effort you will learn a lot!

By Antonio L Climent Albaladejo 5 months ago Completed

I agree with all the positive opinions that have been said here. It’s very difficult to improve the course in quality, presentation, mix of theory and projects and instructors.
I’m 58 years old, some parts of my knowledges are a little rusties, english isn’t my mother language and when I signed in the course I didn’t know anything about Python, but I was very interested in AI. Python is a surprising and amazing programming language and I could study it a little this summer on my own. The use of Pacman game to understand some AI points is incredibly positive and adds a humor and fun flavour to this course. I’ve a lot of experience in distance education and e-learning courses as european student, but I was very surprised with this course, and I think is a positive experience for all european people that probably can perceive some subtle differences in the way of teaching some difficult subjects in EEUU. As long as I can I will go on Python and AI.
Thanks for this opportunity.

By Lucas 5 months ago Completed

The quality of this course was very high. The presentation was always fun, with cool pictures on the slides to keep your attention and help you remember! Plenty of practice material made it possible to properly prepare for the exam. And the projects were fun too, it felt like I was playing a game.

Excellent course overall

By Sai from Tokyo 5 months ago Completed

You can learn basic AI techniques by building a reasonably behaving Pacman (http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/pacman/pacman.html) through 3 programming assignments. The course staff did a great job providing a GUI for Pacman where you can watch and check how your program works. It makes learning AI so much fun! You need some familiarity with object-oriented programming in Python because the programming assignments make heavy use of Python classes to decouple specific game definitions and abstract search/learning policies.

According to the concluding announcement from the course staff, the sequel of this course, cs188.2x, is planned after the next offering of cs188.1x, which will be in the first part of 2013, is complete. The first offering of cs188.2x will be a closed beta for cs188.1x students.

By marjancek 5 months ago Completed

This is, together with MITx 6.002x: Circuits & Electronics, the best on-line course I've taken and completed.

The lectures are clear and entertaining, the homework inviting, and the three projects where engaging and simply fun.

I'm a programmer, but didn't know much Python. I don't know how hard would it be if you knew no programming.

You can make it through the course with less week effort than what's recommended, but It was a pleasure to invest time in the projects, so do try to make time for it.

This is the first part of a two-part course. It had a great balance between theory and practice (though I was missing some proofs now and there) covering everything from start to Q-learning,, but there are still a lot of things left out. I'm hopping part two goes down to 'deep learning'.

All in all, a 5 starts course.

By Andrew from Melbourne, Victoria 5 months ago Completed

The course is run really well. The lectures are well presented, with multi-choice quizzes throughout the lectures to ensure you understood what was just presented. If you missed something, you immediately know to just re-watch the last 5 minutes or so.

If you don't have experience with with python or other object oriented languages it might be good to do another course first, or at least make sure to do the preparation material. The assignments have a lot of sample code & give good directions for what to do, but without the fundamentals some people might struggle.

Having said that, there's plenty of support through the forums, and although the forum interface could use a bit of improvement it's a very minor issue and almost everything else about the course runs very smooth.

By Doug from Kansas City, Missouri 7 months ago Completed

Taking class now, but course and edx site are really well done.
Challenging material, but well-explained. Homework and project support the course well.

Would highly recommend experience with Python and algorithms before starting.

By Anna Gajdová 1 day ago Completed

This wasn't my first AI class but most of the content was new to me. The course consists of pieces of lectures, tests and programming projects. There's always a step-by-step description with a demo. This all together gives you a deep understending of the problems and algorithms taught in the course.

Previous experience with Python is needed but an introdactory level is enough.

I find edX the most engaging and the most complex of all MOOC platform. I would recommend taking Udacity AI and Python classes before this one for the best experience. I think the self-study of the AI has never been more accesible!
I can't wait for the second part :)

By Steve Haigh 10 days ago Completed

Superb course. Met and exceeded expectations, very good intro to the field. Course materials, particularly the homework project code was excellent.

By Matt Arrington from Long Beach, California 2 months ago Completed

This was the first online course I ever took of any kind. This course seemed interesting from the syllabus so I decided to try it for a week or 2. I got hooked, pretty fast and just *had* to finish. The lectures were great. The front end for the homework, tests and projects were better than expected. You need a solid grasp of data structures at a minimum for this course. It can be challenging. I'm looking forward to the follow up class.

By Michal 4 months ago Completed

Great lectures - well prepared and Dan Klein is a good speaker that keeps your total attention.
Assignments that made you really understand the topic. Not too hard, but challenging when one tries to get the full score.
Discussion forums worked fine, the community and staff were helpful.
I really liked the approach where you can submit quizes and assignments as many times you want, until you're satisfied with it.
Only thing I missed was some statistic info about the course, how many people participated, how many did complete, etc. No big deal, just my curiosity

By Mayank Singh from Patna, Bihar 4 months ago Completed

One of the best courses I took on AI. The Professor was pretty awesome with this slides. The course illustrator is to be especially thanked for that. I really loved the projects. Making your pacman learn by playing more games is a brilliant idea but tough to implement. This course made you do just that. I would be eagerly waiting for part 2.
I would suggest knowing a bit of python before taking up the course.

By Singidunum Ex from Boynton Beach, Florida 5 months ago Completed

For all those folks that want to learn from the best of the best, since the Gutenberg time this is the best thing to happen in education, on-line courses from the best universities in the world, and for free!!!
Freedom through technology for everyone with internet access.
This AI course is great way to challenge yourself, I felt fantastic being student again after 18 years :-))
I finished about 50 exams in Electrical engineering in Belgrade Serbia, this course is by its content the real match for an engineer that wants to stay up to date. Even more, this is the avant-garde on how the students should be presented with learning material, this is the future of teaching techniques! If you love technology and being blinded with science, you will enjoy and celebrate every moment of learning in this course :-)).
To the whole AI team, thank you guys for sharing your AI expertise with me, you made my year 2012!

By Sebastián Ramírez Montaño from Bogota, Bogota D.C. 5 months ago Completed

This is one of the greatest courses I've taken. I really enjoyed it.

The way Professor Dan Klein teaches is awesome, with the perfect examples for every concept, all explained in such a detail, but in a smooth gradient, that makes it easy to learn some very advanced algorithms, but in a very pleasant way. Also, his enthusiasm and humor are very contagious and inspiring.

The programing assignments make you create an artificial intelligent PacMan. They certainly keep the interest and show how these things really work.

Also, the quizzes, homeworks and projects are great! Even though those exams are certainly challenging, they never miss the point of teaching something, they make you understand better and make you use the concepts better, rather than trying to "catch" you in an error...

The illustrations / drawings are GREAT! Those illustrations are very funny, cute and very "illustrative" indeed, they are not just drawings, they really help us understand. ...I think they are a key piece of this course.

Also... I should say that understanding those "Artificial Intelligence" algorithms gave me a better "Natural Intelligence". I think that I can "think" a little better now... maybe I'm thinking a little bit "artificially"... and that's great!

By Catalina De La Cuesta from Medellin, Antioquia 5 months ago Completed

Excellent course!!! Absolutely well prepared material, I had no previous knowledge on the topic but the course is so well structured that I got everything, and I think it’s not only valuable if you are going to work on CS, but to understand the human making decision problem and to apply the methods in everyday problem solving.

By Olga Vadimova from Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia 5 months ago Completed

It was very great course. The lecture were excellent. I was looking forward of them in the begining of each week.

Also I was a great experience for me, especially in Python programming and even in English. I suppose I got a lot of useful skills during the study.

I am looking forward the secon part of this course.

By David Holmgren 5 months ago Completed

I loved this course!

The lectures were excellent. In a few places I wanted to ask questions, but my questions were answered further in the lecture. The lecture slides contained the right amount of detail, so they were sufficient for review without having to listen again. Examples in lecture were plentiful and illustrated the concepts perfectly.

The homework problems were great, thorough tests of understanding of the material. I learned a lot working through them.

The projects were the big learning experience. I was new to Python when I started this course, so the learning curve was steep. Frequently I thought my code was working, but the autograder found errors. I made the mistake of thinking my project was in good shape and investing a lot of time on the contest, only to find that my search heuristics were not admissible, and I didn't have time to come up with nontrivial admissible heuristics. Most of all, the projects were fun! I had a blast building Pacman agents.

Knowledge of statistics is listed as a prerequisite, but all you need to know is how to calculate a weighted average. Python is another prerequisite, but if you know another object-oriented language, you can learn it fast enough.

By Satyajit Singh from Kolkata 5 months ago Completed

An amazing course. Lots of learning and fun. The course is extremely engaging and tests your concepts through a great deal of assignments and projects.
Liked the programming assignments a lot and they are really test your understanding of the various concepts you learn throughout the course.
The estimated hours are a bit low, some projects really took a lot of hours than estimated.
A good understanding of probability and python would help a lot. A nice package in all.

By Marcus Voß from Copenhagen, Capital Region 5 months ago Completed

Like:
- great motivating lecturer,
- challenging and fun programming exercises (you get e.g. to program Pac Man "brains") that give you quite a few of those "aha moments", when you see you algorithms can unchanged solve completely different tasks - all in all I found them more challenging then the Machine Learning exercises by Ng,
- lovely slides (all slides are illustrated with great cartoon robots)!

Room for improvement:
- I understand that they wanted to have a faster pace than many of the other courses, but I found it too strict (you get 0 points if you missed your weekly deadline on the exercises)....so I had to give up points simply because I could not fit it in sometimes...

By João Paulo Oliveira Fernandes from Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais 5 months ago Completed

Just waiting for 2x.
Excellent. It improved a lot my programming skills.
All what is needed is a programming background and a notion of statistics.

By Lizandra Hunter 5 months ago Taking Course Now

AWFUL , THIS IS THE WORST COURSE EVER

Here is a detailed review of this course that will help new students in understanding why they should avoid this course

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Professors review
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Let me start off reviewing the course main professor Dan Klein. Dan Klein is the kind of person who thinks his heritage will go down if he gets involved with students because this must be the only the course on earth wherein the course professor has never answered even single question or even acknowledged an post from their student in the entire course period and the videos that we were watching were second hand video tapes that were recorded in the original offering of "CS188 Artificial Intelligence" course at Berkly . Another course professor Pieter Abbeel is an self proclaimed System Admin, so he restricted his replies in acknowledging the issues with the infrastructure and never cared to answer the questions about the concepts that is being thought.

Dan Klein involvement in this course is zero, all he did was dump the existing video tapes over the Internet and call it an course. Professor's attitude clearly shows they never intended to take up this course in the first place, may be they just did it because they were pressurized from their university .

I do realize it is impossible for an professor to get involved in every aspect of an MOOC course. That's the reason why usually MOOC courses have an forum, so that students can ask their doubts and get it clarified. If none of classmates or Teaching Assistants were able to answer the question it is passed onto the professor. This is the pattern that is usually followed in MOOC courses to reduce the workload on the professors but this never happened in this course.

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Student Review
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Students in the first offering of this course were bunch of idiots who thought they were in some kind of a race that needs to be won. No help can come out of students with this attitude. Most of the students took the course only for the certificate that came from one of the top universities. The most common reply to any question in the forum is "Watch the video once again" or "Download the presentation and watch it, you should get the answer". OFCOURSE I DID THAT, I am here because I am unable to understand one of the concept that's being shown in the video. Guys if you are reading this "Sharing your knowledge is the Motto of MOOC courses" , your knowledge is not spent it is gained when you spread it.

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Teaching Assistants
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"Whoever posted most number of comments in the forum on the first week of the course became Teaching Assistants for the rest of this course" , WoW now that's what I call an criteria to select Teaching Assistants. Any rational being even with an IQ of an Gorilla can say nothing good is gonna come out of these guys. Teaching Assistants in the first offering of this course showed a similar pattern of our politicians. Their first job is to delete or close all the posts that they were incapable of understanding or answering. Their second job was to follow the motto "If you can't convince them confuse them", this motto saved them from showcasing their abilities in answering an question. Most of their replies never made any sense, the worst were the threads that were started by these guys, you can be assured it will not contain anything related to the syllabus, all you can find in their is philosophy of life and Business models for MOOC courses. I still can't understand why they posted these craps, may be the professors had given them an target i.e you have to post at-least 'N' number of times per week in the forum if you need to continue as an Teaching Assistant.

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Why post an review on students and Teaching Assistants?
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I do realize that an review on students and teaching assistants is inappropriate while reviewing an course, since these are the entities that change in every offering of the course. But I wanted to convey a message to new students how an MOOC can be an failure only because of wrong attitude. Even though many MOOC's are controlled by organizations their successfulness highly depends on the community. This review was done so that the new students can learn from the mistakes that were committed in here.

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Infrastructure
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Infrastructure that was provided to us was an Sanctuary for BUGS. They had bugs in the Auto-Grader , they had bugs in the forms that were used for Home Works , they even had bugs in the captions that were provided along with the video. Imagine working more than an hour to solve an home work problem and when you enter the answer and click on the Check button , you will get an message saying your "answer is wrong" and the values in the homework problem has now changed, so now you have to redo everything from scratch. The problem with answer was "The grader is case sensitive", Correct answer was "clockwise" and I entered "Clockwise" with an capital 'C' .

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Conclusion
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Taking all the issues with this course into account , I seriously recommend any new AI aspirants to skip this course. If you are really interested in pursuing an course in AI, I would recommend the AI course that is going to be offered from Udacity, you will be learning from the best professors in the field who have dedicated their life for this field(as opposed to the rookies in here) . Even Coursera offers many courses in various branches of Artificial Intelligence , most of the professors who teach in these courses are volunteers as opposed to this one

By Kasun Amarasena 5 months ago Completed

This course is absolutely brilliant and totally mind blowing one, totally surprised me since this was not what I expected. I recommend this to anyone who is interested in AI. Basically you need some math and programming knowledge. Lectures/presentations were really great and so as the projects.
This is the best course I've had so far
Thank you edX, UCBerkely and CS188x Course Team

By Luiz Sá from Araras 5 months ago Completed

Realy great curse. Amazingly insightful lectures, good exercises. Even without previous contact with AI, the quality of the contents made it possible to complete the course.

By Christian Froehlich from Wuerzburg, Bavaria 5 months ago Completed

Absolutely blew my mind!
I can recommend everyone who likes abstract thinking to take it. The course was actually not what I expected, it was more abstract actually and I did like that.
As Well, Dan Klein is a great teacher.

By Alfred Vella from Milon Keynes 5 months ago Completed

An excellent course and I hope the future of mass education.

Although only a small part of AI is covered, search and planning, these are done in a deeper way than I have seen many AI courses.

By Paul Lester 5 months ago Completed

Excellent intro to AI, excellent lectures. The course was much more difficult than I had thought, but I found it much more beneficial for that very reason. The course is also a lot of fun! The lectures and material are easier to digest than some of the other articles and textbooks that exist on this subject. If like me you have not used python before but are fluent in other computer languages, start practicing python ahead of time is my only advice. The course was so good, I cannot come up with any major improvements to make it better.
My background was a good fit but quite eclectic. I would expect someone to need a good grounding in computer programming, O math, probability and statistics, and computer gaming to some extent to do well.
I have not taken any similar level CS courses before but it compares favorably with the courses in other fields which I have taken in various universities such as Brown, Cornell and others. I would put it on-par with the best of the college courses I have taken in years past, such as A&EP 264 (Computer Instrumentation Design), Physics 400 (Advanced Laboratory), and Japanese Anthropology (ASIAN 364?) to name 3 (though there are many more on that list).

By Vitor Hirota from Campinas, Sao Paulo 5 months ago Completed

Can't stress enough how surprised I was with the overall experience I had during this course. It's a feeling of lesson learned, mission accomplished! Thanks to the awesome, humorous and intuitive lectures by Prof Klein, and all the acitivity on the course forum, community TAs and users helping each other and sharing ideas. Anyhow, it was a great course, edX has a really nice platform set up and I will be waiting for the second part of the course.

By Daniel Franch from Curitiba 5 months ago Completed

It is simply one of the best courses I have taken in my life. The lecturer explains all the topics with great clarity. It is easy to see how much he enjoys Artificial Intelligence and he transmits his love for the subject very well.
The weekly homeworks are very well-thought and span through a wide range of difficulty, but they help a lot in the comprehension of the topics.
There are 3 projects using a pre-programmed UI with a Pacman theme that makes you feel that you really understood AI when you get the algorithms to work.
It was a very enjoyable course and I recommend it to anyone with some interest in AI.

By Diego Allen from Asuncion, Asuncion 5 months ago Completed

Top notch course, the quality you would expect from a world class university as UC Berkeley. What I liked the most about this course is the programming projects, where you actually get to implement all the fancy AI algorithms you were taught in lectures.

By Bikram 5 months ago Completed

The course was very engaging. The community was good with great community TAs
Knowledge of python is useful.

By Patrick Daly from Bellevue, Michigan 5 months ago Completed

I can't begin to thank the creators of this course enough for the amazing challenge they provided. edX is the front runner as far as MOOC's go, and I think that the education community is waking up to the idea of free education for all. I learned a vast quantity of material from 188.1x; it has truly reshaped my mind as far as approaching computers.

AI concepts like the ones presented are not easy to grasp without a VERY solid base in computing, but Dan's lectures provide a very clear explanation of the materials.

"What does that mean?" -Dan Klein, multiple times per lecture when he used words that sent my brain reeling.

It means that when your brain asplodes, he puts it back together more efficiently. It means he breaks it down into easy to understand pieces, before you get to the projects and get to teach Pacman to execute the major principles he was talking about. The lectures are fast paced, but delivered near flawlessly, and structured so everything fits together neatly. Even with how fast they went, I didn't have to rewind or revisit the videos often; DK got the material to stick the first time.

Also, the python fanboy in me has to come out at least a little. Python allowed the projects to be more than just good code, but truly beautiful code. Elegance through simplicity. For all the extra ability my third project had, it had fewer lines of code. More and more advanced concepts, continually rendered beautiful by python :D

I learned how to get a computer to learn, not just react, and I cannot express the measure of my gratitude to everyone who gave their time to provide me with this challenging, extraordinary opportunity.