There is still time to join in what will surely be the world's largest class - the online version of Stanford University's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Plus news of its two-track approach and the course schedule.

If you are one of the more than a hundred thousand people who had indicated their interest in the free online AI class that starts on October 10th, you should have received an email to prompt you to complete the enrollment process.

If not you, and anyone else who is interested, has until October 9th to enrol.

The new information on the registration page is that there will now be two tracks, both of which will lead to a statement of accomplishment signed by both Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun on successful completion.

• the basic track - in which you watch lectures and answer basic quizzes. This is not the full course. But you will still learn all the basics of AI.
• the advanced track - is the full class, which aspires to be of Stanford difficulty. You do homework assignments and take exams.

Also you don't have to decide now - you can switch from the advanced track, which requires homework assignments to be submitted and two exams to be taken on specific dates, to the basic track involving lecture videos and quizzes at any point. Clearly the commitment for the advanced track is much greater and you are advised to make sure you are available on the 19th November and 17th of December for the midterm and final exams. The online exam takes up to four hours to complete but there will be some flexibility in the start time but once you start it has to be completed in the four hours.

You can also have a look at the the full course schedule. This indicates that the course is far from an easy walk in the park. It includes the standard fare of AI - search, logic, image processing and machine learning. But it also has some more unusual topics for an introduction - reinforcement learning, Markov Decision Processes and robot motion planning. It is also clear that to cope with the range of topics you are going to have to be happy about math.

Official registration hasn't yet opened for the other two Standford free online courses Machine Learning and Introduction to Databases that we recently covered, but pre-registration sign-ups are approaching 50,000 for each of them.

So Standford professors and tutors are going to be very busy this fall in what promises to be an interesting experiement in online course delivery.

More information:

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

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