One of the courses that I like the idea of doing (perhaps next year) is M366 (Natural and Artificial Intelligence). It is currently part way through its first presentation and yesterday I exchanged a couple of emails with some who is presently a student on that course. I wanted to know from them what the course was like, what it covered, did it live up to expectations etc.
The answer is that...its quite hard, many people have dropped out because of the programming, but that it is interesting. The programming environment is NetLogo - a new name to me - which is a modelling/simulation environment that can be programmed in what looks like a version of Logo (in much the same way that Scheme is a descendant of Lisp, I guess). This environment allows you to simulate all sorts of dynamic systems - from groups of people interacting at a party and their levels of group happiness, to biological systems, physical systems (moelecules interacting) etc.
Really sounds like a lot of fun and very interesting.
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2 comments:
Simon
I'm looking at tackling this course over 2008/09 academic year or the 2010/2011 academic year. I am really interested in seeing how it pans out for current students and don't expect it to be easy at all.
It does look like one of the more exciting/interesting courses that the OU Computing department has to offer and i'm looking forward to it. Let me know if you get any more feedback about the course as it goes on.
Simon
Hi Simon, thanks for the comment. Having had my fingers burnt last year doing the first presentation of M359 I decided to avoid the first run of a course where ever possible.
But the comments I have heard so far suggest that M366 is going quite well - provided that you are into programming (I know that you are). I'll be keeping my eyes open, and ears to the ground, so if I find out more I'll post it to the blog and let you know.
Cheers!
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