AI class journal
This is my journal for the AI class. Latest entries on top.
2011-12-21
It's 12:21pm Wednesday afternoon. I just got my mark for the final exam: 61%. I ended up sitting the exam a few days ago, because a note about it came through to me via email and I figured I should have a go at it. I'm pretty pleased with my mark of 61% given that I missed three weeks worth of work. My scores for the subject are now:
| HW1 | 96 |
| HW2 | 100 |
| HW3 | 80 |
| HW4 | 90 |
| HW5 | 89 |
| Midterm | 79 |
| HW6 | 0 |
| HW7 | 0 |
| HW8 | 0 |
| Final | 61 |
2011-12-03
It's 1:23am Saturday morning. I can't quit this class. I've ben too involved in it to just let it go. I'm coming back. I'm just really busy, so please give me some time to catch up.
2011-11-27
It's 10:33am Sunday morning. Haven't done any work on the course for over a week. Pretty sure it all falls down.
2011-11-22
It's 2:43pm Tuesday. I got 79% in the midterm. I don't think I'm going to end up finishing the course.
2011-11-19
It's 3:22am Saturday morning. Haven't been doing any work on the AI class. Think maybe I should pick that up today. Just finished watching The Two Towers. I've been watching it on and off for the last few days. Maybe I'll go watch The Return of the King now, rather than doing my work. :P
Totally feel like dropping the AI class and getting on with ProgClub and particularly Blackbrick developments. Don't think I'll give up just yet, but I truly wonder why I'm doing this course. Don't have any plans to become an AI programmer, and feel like my time would be more valuably applied in other areas. But now that I've started and come about half-way I feel like I really should finish. I leave too many things unfinished.
2011-11-18
It's 4:02am Friday morning. Results are in for homework 5, and I got 89%. I'm spewing, because I reckon I deserve 100% this week! It was a pretty ambiguous question, and I picked the interpretation the markers didn't. Anyway, life goes on.
No journal entry for yesterday. I had a really busy day on Wednesday. In the morning I wrote the Blackbrick business plan, and sent it to a few people for review. Then in the middle of the day I had lunch with Stacey in Parramatta before heading over for an appointment at Westmead. Then in the evening had a few brews at the Tav and made a few "interesting" friends. Yesterday I spent the whole day pretty much just revising the Blackbrick business plan. It gets me pretty excited!
Exam this weekend. Don't think I'm really prepared, but I'll take it as it comes. Still need to do my transcriptions for this week and last week. I've fallen way behind.
2011-11-16
It's 4:10am Wednesday morning. The AI class midterm is coming up this weekend. We have 72 hours to complete the exam, so I'm not too worried about it. Expect it will be a chore, but that's OK. There is only one unit for this week, Unit 11, not two units as usual. I need to watch most of this unit before the exam, as some of the material in the unit is covered in the exam, apparently.
Tonight I've been checking out a UML diagramming tool called UMLet, which looks pretty good. I've been thinking of UMLing the MediaWiki codebase. I had a look at the code in MediaWiki today, just poking around in the source tree, and found a few interesting things. Was mostly interested in how their database updater worked, and it's pretty good, although I think I'd do things a little differently. Totally stumped as to how I'd UML a PHP app though. There are directories, which are kind of like packages. There are files, which are also kind of like packages, although maybe also like classes. There are classes, which are obviously classes, and then there are functions, which don't seem to have a suitable form in UML, so I'm not sure how I'd represent those. Maybe files with functions in them could be modelled as classes with methods in them. Maybe I could make those class diagrams a different colour or something.
There hasn't been much going on on the internet lately. At least not in my little corner of it. Pressed 'Like' a few times on facebook, got an email from Thomas (he doesn't want to work on blackbricks), and had a bit of a chat with Key on her blog. She's picking up PHP now, so maybe she'll fix up Member Net for us. I've written a spec for the pcmnet upgrades I'd like her to do.
2011-11-15
It's 2:15am Tuesday morning. Kinda haven't been feeling very good again today, it really hasn't been my week. Been having a bit of a chat on the ProgClub list (yesterday afternoon mostly) and been playing a little bit of StarCraft (had one game with minds). Also, I've been watching the lectures for Unit 9 and 10. Got through all the lectures for Unit 9, and most of the lectures for Unit 10, although I haven't finished yet. There was a note on the course web-site that homework has been extended and is not due until the 17th, so that's handy. Takes the pressure off. Kinda have the feeling like I'm not going to do a very good job with the homework this week, I haven't understood the material very well at all, and it looks like I'll need to be more patient in doing the required calculations than I'm likely to be in my present state. I'm annoyed because I want more distractions. More conversations to have than I'm in. But... I'm picky too. For instance, I'm subscribed to the MediaWiki mailing lists (well, one of them) and I don't even bother reading it any more, and it's not really a place to have the kind of chats that I want to have, which would be meandering whimsical philosophical pondering and musings. Asked Thomas if he wanted to take a year off to work on the Blackbrick with me today. I'd be surprised if he said yes, but that would be pretty cool I reckon.
It's 9:02pm. Woke up a few hours ago and got my homework in for last week. I'm not super confident in my answers, but don't think I'll be able to do much better, so I'm just gonna roll with what I have. Had started writing a JavaScript program to compute Q-values, but after I got stuck about how it should work I went back to the actual question and realised I didn't need a program at all, it was just one iteration that the question called for. This week's work has been released, but I think I'll try and do the write-up for last week before I pick up the work for this week. We'll see. Totally feel like procrastinating. Maybe it's the heat? Today is one month since I started this journal, but it feels like it has been much longer.
2011-11-14
It's 12:59am Monday morning (or late Sunday night, take your pick). I'm sorta kinda almost about to start my work for the night. Have been just checking and rechecking my email and facebook for the last hour it seems, but there are no messages, so I should really get on with something else. I'm kind of hungry though, so I think I'm going to go on a midnight run to McDonalds to pick up some food, and then hopefully I'll get stuck into my study when I get home.
It's 1:48am. Back from Maccas. Totally rebelling from doing any work. Would much rather be chatting to people on the internet, although at this hour there's pretty much no-one to chat to. Will probably just get on with my work tonight. I guess we'll see. I kinda need to get moving with it, homework is due Tuesday morning and I'm running out of time.
2011-11-13
It's 5:51am Sunday morning. I feel much better than I did when I wrote yesterday's entry a few hours ago. Haven't done very much this evening though. Kinda just been kicking it on the internet, although it's a very slow news week over on progit and there's been next to nothing happening on facebook or my email over the course of the night. I spent some time setting up a ProgClub account for G and subscribed him to the mailing lists. Apart from that I've done pretty much sweet FA, bar sending an empty bleat to the ProgClub list. Not sure what I'm going to do today. Eventually I guess I'll go to sleep. The question on everyone's lips is, what on Earth am I going to do about the tremendous amount of work I need to get done by Tuesday? I wish I had an answer for that. :P
It's 6:22am. Still nothing going on. I really should just do my fucking work. This morning I feel like finding someone guilty and screaming FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU in their face. I don't think I'm very stable.
It's 11:21am. I just got a note from Professor Thrun encouraging me to keep with the course and congratulating me on getting all my homework in. I replied with a link to my transcriptions, my errata, and this journal. I'm not sure that he would care and/or have the time to check it out, but now I'm feeling kinda bad for swearing as much as I do. :P (Of course it was *Ben* who dropped the "c word", not me! :)
It's 11:46am. It just dawned on me that I'm unlikely to get my transcriptions finished in time for homework this week, so my plan is to watch the videos and do my homework, and try to catch up with the transcriptions later. In the mean time I've just done the video embedding part of my notes.
2011-11-12
It's 11:10pm on Saturday. Things aren't going well at all. I'm way behind on my work for this week, and I feel terrible. I don't know what it is, but I just can't bring myself to do my work. I think I'm depressed. I feel lonely. I can't concentrate. I'm bored. I've just finished watching X-Men on TV. Didn't really enjoy it, but had to do something to pass the time. Think I'm just going to play StarCraft until I can fall asleep today. Just gotta sit out this terrible feeling, and wait to feel normal again.
It's 11:44pm. Not much has happened since my last entry. Just been stressing. Tried to sleep, but that's not going to happen. Have only been up since about 4pm. Made myself a coffee, which was probably a bad idea given how I feel, somewhere between depressed and anxious. Had a smoke, but that didn't help. Well, not much. Don't really feel like playing StarCraft. Figure my best move will be just to try and do my uni work. If I get stuck into it maybe I can distract myself until it's bed time again. Let's see.
2011-11-11
It's 5:27pm Friday. No mystery writers today, I'm writing my own journal again. :) Got a lift home from Ben's house this morning from Dad at around 9am, then went back to bed. Got up around 4pm today, and have just eased into the day with a few games of StarCraft. Really need to get on with my uni work tonight because I'm sort of behind for the week now. It's Friday already and I haven't even started this week's work! Time to get on with it I suppose.
It's 11:59pm, figured I'd put in a quick note to close today. I'm currently re-watching the first office hours videos to try and find a particular quote from Norvig that has been bothering me a bit for the last half hour. While watching the video I noticed another thing that Norvig said that was related. Since that other thing comes first in the video I'll mention that first. Basically a question that was similar to another question had been voted up, and on observing this Norvig said "so that's obviously on all your minds", which annoys me because it wasn't on "all" our minds at all, it simply got a relative lot of votes, maybe from a vocal minority, without doubt not from "all". It's a small point, but it bothers me for reasons that I'm about to get to. At 6:55 in the video Norvig talks about a computer assistant that might make everyone twice as productive, he says "if we could make everyone twice as effective by giving them an assistant that would make the world twice as wealthy and healthy." The thing that pisses me off about that isn't the spirit of what he says, but the detail. Increasing everyone's rate of production by two wouldn't automatically double our wealth at all. Who knows how long it would take at double productivity to double our wealth? GDP grows by 2 or 3 percent per year generally, doesn't it? So if it were growing by 4 or 6 percent per year instead it might take about 12 years to double instead of about 29 years, assuming growth is a function of wealth, which it probably isn't (are GDP growth rates absolute or relative, I don't know). Anyway, my point is simply that this is an example of lax thinking from a genius. I mean, you won't get any argument from me that Norvig is a genius, he's a very successful and accomplished individual and he's certainly someone I would consider a world class genius, and here he is saying something that demonstrates wrong thinking. The particular reason this bothers me is that this is an example of a *genius* at work, and it's not great. What if instead of taking examples of the work of genius, we took the average of all people? My point is, if genius isn't always right, and isn't always great, then we could only expect even *less* of "average". And "democracy" and the "marketplace" are both mediums that work on mass averaging. Today my belief in democracy and commerce is shot.
2011-11-10
It's 8:16PM and I'm at Ben's house. Didn't do much today. Got up about 1pm. Played Starcraft while i waited for Shazz to come and visit. Went to the pub and had a few Guinness and lost about $65 in the pokies and then came to Ben's house and hung out for a while with him and Shazz. Shazz went home but took us to the liquor shop and we got some red wine and beers. Will have to leave studying for tomorrow when i'm hung over, which is the best time to study. Simpsons is on but Ben's crappy reception isn't picking it up at the moment. So watching Big Bang Theory which Ben doesn't like but his mother watches every night. Literally. Ben wrote this. (Ben didn't do much today. Woke up about 3pm with a cigarette hangover from smoking too much the night before, due to having a carton of cigarettes my friend brought me from overseas (thanks Sunny, you trying to kill me you cunt?!), helped move some furniture with my brother for my sister for her party for her daughter tomorrow. Got home had a shower and John and Shahriar arrived. Now drinking a refreshing beer with John. The End.) Just introduced John to George Carlin because a paragraph on the manifesto page reminded me of a george carlin skit i saw but can't seem to find it at the moment. anyway, we've watched a few but he want this one to be linked, so here i am typing when i could be drinking and smoking more. George Carlin doesn't like fat people Ben just did a political compass test Political Compass Test and got pretty much the same result as John (Libertarian Left). The Result
2011-11-09
It's 11:17pm Wednesday. Made some progress on my Unit 8 write-up today, that's almost finished now, and I expect I'll probably finish it tonight. Spent a little while checking out the aiqus forum today, and it's pretty quiet over there. The administrators have released a new facility on the course web-site to gather questions for the virtual "office hours" where the teachers answer questions. It pisses me off that I need a google account to use the service. It uses a thing called Google Moderator. I submitted two questions. One was a Miscellaneous question about "neats" and "scuffies" and opinions about those terms, and the other was a Suggestion that example code be published to elucidate the algorithms we learn about. Don't know if other people will vote for my questions or not, so far no-one has. I voted a few shit questions down for being fluff, and voted up a few suggestions I thought were worthwhile. Feeling quite critical as a result. :P
Someone linked to my lecture notes from delicious, not sure how much more of that we'll see. On the one hand it's really cool when people link to your stuff, on the other hand I worry about too many people clicking through and nailing my server. Hope nothing gets out of hand, but it's fun to see people checking out my notes. Haven't really been keeping a close eye on the jj5.net weblogs, but been running a tail -f this evening and there's not really very much activity.
2011-11-08
It's 3:59pm on Tuesday. Results are in for Homework 4 and I got 90%. Missed two answers and gave two incorrect answers, but in fact I'm happy with my result. I haven't been hitting the 100's but my average homework mark so far is 91.5%, which I'm quite happy with. Units 9 and 10 have been released, so I'll have to get stuck into those soon. I still have most of Unit 8 to write up, so hopefully I'll make some progress on that today. I'd really like to find myself in a position where I'm right on top of things this week, let's say that I've got my homework submitted and all the units written up before the weekend. Counting today that's Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to get the best part of three units written up and homework completed, which is probably a little tough, but doable. I think I'll make that my goal, and if I miss, no harm done. Would like to get back to working on that checkers simulation I started a few weeks back, and I want to be on top of my study before I pick that up again. Anyway, that's news for today. Got my homework result and I'm kind of on top of everything at the moment.
It's 10:05pm. I should have mentioned earlier, but it's Mum's birthday today. She went out with Dad for dinner, but they're home (and in bed already) now. I'm going spare. I'm not sure if I'm bored, or lonely, or what, but I feel like shit. Have been trying to just go to sleep, but haven't been able to. I'm not really tired, I just feel terrible. I tried calling paulg earlier in the night, but couldn't get through. Had a brief chat on the phone with dubz. Tried watching TV with Hamish, but I find I can't pay attention to the television for very long before I get fed up with it, I can barely sit through a movie these days. Anyway, got out of bed to come over here and vent. Not sure why. I've had a really unproductive day. Didn't get any of the Unit 8 material written up like I was supposed to. Spent a fair bit of time playing StarCraft. Even StarCraft doesn't make me feel better, I'm kind of getting sick of it. Feel like screaming or something. Maybe it's just akathisia. I dunno. Gah!
2011-11-07
It's 7:04am Monday morning. Didn't get Unit 8 done yesterday, so have to get that done today. Homework 4 is due about 10am tomorrow and I should get that done today in time for tomorrow. Asher asked about how uni was going on the ProgClub list, and I sent through an answer that details the work I've done. It's kinda nice to take a step back and look at what I've managed to achieve so far, I've got a lot of work done. Still more than half of it ahead of me though, so it's not time to relax yet. Anyway, think I'll get straight on with my Unit 8 write up this morning, and hopefully get to my homework by the afternoon.
It's 8:13am now. Got the first two videos done for Unit 8. Just wanted to swing by and comment about something. During my write up for Unit 7 I came across this quote: "if they're equivalent, then the implication relation holds." As I mentioned on facebook Hofstadter would have been impressed. Just wanted to write that down, because I think it's cool. :P
It's 1:15pm. I've done a fair bit of the write-up for Unit 8, but I haven't finished it yet. Concerned that I might run out of time I skipped ahead to the homework and have done all but the last question. I swung by my journal just now because I wanted to bleat about something. In the note for homework 4 question 8 the administrators have put in a *correction* to an error in the question and labelled it as a *clarification*. That just pisses me off. It's not *unclear*, it is *wrong*. If you've made a mistake you should fucking admit it.
It's 1:54pm. I've been procrastinating a little bit since my last entry about half an hour ago. Just wanted to swing by and correct one of my journal entries from a few weeks ago, my first journal entry in fact. In it I gave an opinion on some of the stats I'd inferred from youtube's published stats, but it turns out that the numbers reported on youtube are completely unreliable. It had seemed like there had been massive attrition in the numbers of students, but in reality it wasn't anywhere near as bad as it seemed when going off the youtube numbers. The numbers I heard were reported by Professor Norvig were that there were 46,000 students who submitted homework 1, and 37,000 for homework 2, and that's just for the advanced track, there would be many more only doing the basic track which doesn't have homework. So this course is still in the running to have a massive impact! Cool!
2011-11-06
It's 3:04pm Sunday. Kinda woke up about midday. Well, I'd woken up much earlier, around 6am. I found myself on the couch in the family room. I just passed out there yesterday. :P Had a bit to drink (red wine, and a cigar with Dad on the balcony on late Saturday afternoon) and had been awake for a long time and fell asleep waiting for dinner. Didn't feel too hung-over, although I guess I did feel a little bit seedy. Anyway, I moved myself over to my bedroom around 6am and then slept through to the early afternoon. Someone had opened the window in my room, so it was nice and fresh in there. Been spending a little bit of time on and off this afternoon just catching up on the rest of Unit 7, which I've almost finished now. Technically I was supposed to have that finished by yesterday, and I should be doing Unit 8 today, but I'm not really very far behind. I'll still be trying to get Unit 8 done today, after I finish Unit 7. It seems very quiet lately. Not much activity on any of the mailing lists I hang out on, not much other email, nothing of much significance on facebook... I dunno, just seems real quiet. That's probably good, I have a lot of work to be doing, so it's probably best I'm not distracting myself with other things.
It's 6:13pm now. I finished my write-up for Unit 7, and now it's on the Unit 8 I guess, although I really don't feel like doing it. I don't even feel like playing StarCraft. I'm bored and lonely today I think. Tried putting in a call to my brother Tim, and tried calling Steve, but no-one is answering their phone. Bah. Feel stuck in a hole today.
2011-11-05
It's 3:06am Saturday morning. I woke up about an hour ago, which is annoying, because I feel like I need more sleep. Tried to go back to bed, but that was futile. Been smoking cigarettes and eating the roast dinner that was left in the fridge for me. Made myself a coffee. Really hesitant to start my work for today, because I know what an ordeal yesterday was, and I'm in for more of the same today. Oh well, best get on with it. Today I'm going to make a start on Unit 7, and if I'm to stick with my schedule I'll need to finish the whole thing today. *Groan*.
2011-11-04
It's 4:28am Friday morning. I've been awake since about midnight and have been working on my transcriptions for Unit 6. I'm about one third of the way though, and have been at it for about four and a half hours, so extrapolating that I have about nine hours ahead of me if I'm to stick to my schedule. My schedule being Unit 6 on Friday, Unit 7 on Saturday and Unit 8 on Sunday. Man, that's a lot of work to do. I'm still struggling with the course content as I go through it, it really does all seem a little beyond me, although as I reflect on what I've done and what I've managed to learn I am quite pleased. So I'm definitely getting something out of the course, even if it's not a complete understanding. I'm gonna go grab a smoke and try to find something to eat, then it's back to work I guess. I haven't been playing any StarCraft, so that's good. :P
It's exactly 3pm Friday. Fuck me! I've been working pretty much solid for the last fifteen hours, and I've just *finally* finished my transcription of Unit 6. On the one hand, that's great, because I'm on schedule. On the other hand, I can't believe how long it took me, and I don't know if I'll be up for a repeat performance for units 7 and 8 tomorrow and the day after. Not only that, but it's Friday and I've only just caught up with *last week's* work. Anyway, I'm done for today, and that's the main thing. Bed time for me now I think.
2011-11-03
It's 9:16am Thursday morning. I woke up around midnight last night, and worked at doing the transcriptions for Unit 5, which I finished this morning. Now I'm up to Unit 6, which I've just barely begun. Probably going to go back to sleep now though, and work on it when I wake up.
Have been reading the Barbara Marciniak book Path of Empowerment that Heidi recommended I check out, and I can't believe how terribly bad it is. It's just airy-fairy bullshit. People like Barbara Marciniak should be banned from publishing. Anyway, I wasted some of my morning reading the first 30 odd pages of the book. I'm trying to find an optimistic way to look at the book, such as "it's just a bit of fun", but I'm having trouble swallowing that. Sometimes people just really disappoint me, with how stupid, fanciful, gullible and uncritical they can be. Anyway. Meh. I don't have something nice to say, so maybe I should say nothing. I feel terrible for Heidi, who is only trying to search for the meaning and purpose of her life, and find clues as to how she should conduct her life, and she finds rubbish like this which seems to her to pass muster because it seems to sound profound, and it is in print, after all. People seem to lend a lot of credibility to what is in writing. "Books" are an authority by virtue of their mere form. Leadership in this world is sorely lacking.
2011-11-02
It's 2:29am Wednesday. Not much happening around here at the moment. I've been doing a little bit of the reading from the AIMA textbook, and chatting a little bit about philosophy on the aiqus forums. I posted a link on the aiqus forums to my notes here on this wiki, and a few people have clicked through to check them out. I hope I don't get stampeded though. The server that hosts jj5.net also does the Blackbrick hosting and of particular importance is my IMAP server, so if that gets "slashdotted" my email will go down along with the wiki. Don't want that to happen.
Not really sure what I'm going to be doing this evening, probably not a whole lot. Might just keep plodding away with the readings from the textbook. Still have some of Unit 5 and all of Unit 6 to do up for last week, and it'll be a few more hours before this week's work is released on the course web-site. So maybe I should do up some of the lecture notes today too. I dunno. Kinda don't feel like doing much today.
Now it's 12:16pm. Got a whole lot of nothing done last night. Kicking myself that I didn't use the time to double-check my homework. Ended up getting 80% because I made two silly mistakes. One was that I wrote down a 3 when I should have written a 2. The other was that I wrote down x squared when I should have written x. So lame. Anyway, I've learned that I should take the time to double check my work if I want to get the best mark I can in this course, and in future I will try to be more careful. Off to sleep for me now I think. I have a long week ahead.
2011-11-01
It's 3:14am Tuesday morning. It was Hamish's birthday yesterday, and we had BBQ chicken for dinner, and cake to celebrate. I put in a call to Cousin Dave to wish him happy birthday too, but didn't get through. I guess it's birthday wishes via facebook only this year. It was also Halloween of course, and Brianna and Hamish had their regular elaborate decorations up out in the front yard. There were a few children that stopped by trick-or-treating. It's funny in Australia witnessing this North American tradition creep in, and seeing different people's positive and negative reactions to that.
Anyway... Holy Crap! I thought I was going to be entirely beaten this week. I had pretty much resolved myself to submitting nothing for my homework this week, because I'm only about a quarter of the way (or less) through the write-up for last week's lessons; but I had a look at the questions, and figured I could probably have a go at the first one, and then one thing lead to another, and in the end I've submitted answers for all of this week's homework questions! How about that!? Of course, I very well may have made a mistake or three, but I've surprised myself simply having a go. Homework isn't due until about 11am in the morning, about 8 hours from now, and I guess I could go over my homework to double check it, and maybe I'll do that later, but first I'm just going to play hours and hours of StarCraft. :) I'll be over the moon getting a non-zero mark for this week, and there's an outside chance I'll get 100% again, fingers crossed. Anyway, I'm rewarding myself with some gaming, and I've got the rest of the week to catch up with last week's work, and maybe I even will catch up this week. :P
Still haven't done any of the recommended reading from the textbook, and I should really get around to that too. I have three weeks' worth of reading to catch up on now, and it won't be long before that gets totally out of hand. Maybe I'll make my plan for today to catch up with the readings from the textbook before I go to sleep, and then worry about my notes later in the week.
2011-10-30
It's 7:22pm on Sunday night. I'm struggling. I'm way behind on my notes, even though I spent a solid few hours last night / early morning working on them. My motivation is shot. I don't think I'm going to be done in time to get my homework done in time. I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
The family is ordering fish and chips for dinner, but I'm just going to have some chips, because I just finished my stuffed-crust supreme from yesterday and I'm not really hungry. I think I'll play some computer games for a while now (StarCraft, naturally) and see how I feel about getting stuck into my work in a few hours. It really doesn't look like I'm going to be on top of my game by Tuesday morning when the homework is due. I don't even feel particularly bad about that.
On the aiqus forum there were a number of people complaining about the teaching style, particularly for this unit. I wouldn't complain, but I do feel as though the material hasn't been explained to me in a way that I can understand. I've been doing my notes but really haven't followed the logic behind the maths at all. It all seems contrived to me. That is, I don't understand why they do the calculations that they do. I'm just not keeping up.
2011-10-29
It's 2:16pm on Saturday. Last night I got the notes for Unit 4 and Homework 2 done. Then I rewarded myself for sticking to my schedule by playing a few games of StarCraft. :P
Today I'm starting on the notes for Unit 5, and then the plan is to get Unit 6 done tomorrow and then have a day or two to get the week's homework done, and by then I'll be on top of things. Have a feeling that things aren't going to go so well with the homework this week. I don't think my scores of 96% and 100% for homework reflect my level of understanding of the material. In truth I'm quite lost, and feel right out of my depth with the maths we're learning. I was very confused about Unit 4 and there was no homework for that. Anyway, I guess that as usual we'll just wait and see what happens.
2011-10-28
It's 3:13pm on Friday. I didn't get up until about 1pm today (I was up until about 3am playing StarCraft :P) when Raema called. She was going to visit today, but then called later to cancel. Anthony from the Tav is here getting ready with Brianna for the Halloween party on at the Tav tonight. Hamish is expected home after 3pm when he finishes work. I thought about going, but think I'll save my money and stay here working on the AI class instead. I think I'll try to quickly get the Unit 4 work done, and if I have time after that get stuck into this week's work. Been playing more StarCraft than I should. Had some great wins though. At the moment my tactics have been teching to air straight away, and that works fairly well. I blitzed the last game by just building tanks and thors, no bio or air units. I had five factories pumping out mech units and four bases all up. Fun! Anyway, hopefully my procrastination is done for the day and I can get on with my AI class notes.
2011-10-27
It's 11:07pm on Thursday night. Aleksei visited this morning and we hung out for a few hours. After that I managed to get my AI class overview notes finished for Unit 3. I then watched all the videos for Unit 4, and some of Unit 5, but haven't started transcribing those yet. I watched all the question videos for this week's homework and didn't understand a thing about what they were asking, so I have a fair bit to learn over the next few days. That's about it. I'm not sure if I'm planning to stay up and begin transcribing videos tonight, or if I'll just play some StarCraft for a while and get to bed relatively early. Let's see what happens!
2011-10-26
It's 1:23pm on Wednesday. I'm way behind in my notes. I went to the course web-site today to continue with week 2 unit 4 notes, but the course web-site has been down all morning. I've been trying to access it every half hour or so for the last few hours. Hopefully it comes back online soon -- I want to know how I did in my homework. While I'm waiting for the course web-site to become available I've been doing a little bit of reorganisation for my notes. Instead of having notes per week, I now have notes per unit. There are two units per week, then the week's homework. The reason for splitting things up is to try and keep the page size down a bit, the notes I've been taking consume a lot of space. I still need to write up my 'overview' for week 2, but I've only done one of the two units for week 2, and the titles of the lectures aren't amenable to a structure for my overview. I.e. I don't want to have 'cancer' or 'coin flip' or 'happiness' as my headings for review, rather I'd like headings like 'conditional independence' and 'Bayes rule', etc. So that's giving me a little cognitive dissonance, and is a cause for procrastination. I guess I really should do up the overview notes while the course web-site is down, because I can't really do anything else. Let's see how I go.
It's 3:39pm now, and the course web-site is back online. And guess what!? I got 100% for my week 2 homework! I can't tell you how happy I am about that. That's just cool. :) So... so far I have 96% and 100% for the first two lots of homework, which I think is a pretty good score! Now all I need to do is keep at this level -- which is going to be just so terribly hard. Oh well. Let's see.
2011-10-25
It's 2:15pm on Tuesday. Gah! I'm *losing*. I didn't log in my journal for Monday (yesterday) because I was too busy trying to catch up with my lectures and notes, and what I could do with my homework. I ended up leaving my homework unfinished for the deadline, but today I've discovered that there has been a 1 day extension for homework which means I have about 20 hours to try again. I don't know what I'm going to do, because I simply have not understood the material.
I've been disappointed with the quality of my contributions to the class forum. They've mostly been off-topic or "meta" questions that I've asked. I did go to ask a specific question about the course content, but before submitting my question I found someone else had already asked pretty much the same question. I asked about getting worked examples and was referred to this and this. I reviewed those but remained lost afterward.
I've been having a problem with my computer running very slowly, which I think makes a pretty big difference to the time it takes for me to do my notes, because I need to swap between browser windows and navigate to a lot of URLs and the delay on each one slows me down considerably. What I've done to try and remedy that is to purchase and install the latest version of VMware Fusion (version 4) which claims that it can make apps run a little bit faster. I've also decided to keep my browser on the mac closed (which I usually have open to facebook) and to keep my email client (Thunderbird) closed in Windows, for the sake of consuming less RAM. I've also disabled the SQL Server service on Windows as it was consuming a lot of CPU doing some sort of maintenance. Keeping my browser and email client closed might help to distract me less too, although I do feel a little uneasy not having constant access to email.
At the moment it is week 3 of the course, and I'm only halfway through the material for week 2. I have just tonnes of work to do to catch up.
At this stage I'm resolved to continuing with the course and not worrying too much about what my grade will be in the end. I'd really love to find myself in a position where I had caught up with the AI class so that I could devote some more attention to the ML class which I haven't touched for over a week now. I'm even further behind in the ML class.
I feel like I'm thrashing. I'm doing lots of "busy work" but not getting very far in my understanding. This makes me question my approach to note taking and practice. Maybe I'd do better if I took less notes and did more practice questions. I think I'll stick with my rigorous note-taking though, as I feel like that will leave me with an asset on the completion of the course, being my notes. If I have good notes it will be easier to review the course content and I might be able to understand more coming back to my notes in the future.
2011-10-23
It's 5:55pm and I've spent most of my day making slow progress through my lecture notes for the AI class. I called Stacy and cancelled our meet-up that was planned for Monday so that I can stay up late trying to get the learning I need done so that I can do the homework which is due early Monday morning.
I left a note on a talk page over on GeekDownUnder's wiki suggesting that he checkout the UCC's chatroom to try and find others doing the AI class in Western Australia.
Will continue to slog it out now.
2011-10-22
It's 9:36am on Saturday. I just woke up. Planning to hammer through my work for the AI class today, and tomorrow if necessary. Once my AI class work is complete for this week I'll see what I can do about picking up the work for the ML class. I think I'll add more to this journal entry later in the day once I've done more work. I've really been struggling to get a good understanding of the probability theory we are covering in the AI class, hopefully I make a breakthrough today.
It's now 11:09am, and I've spend the last hour or two adding new features to the AI class documentation, being the AI class prerequisites and the AI class readings. The prerequisites are youtube videos from the Kahn Academy and I've embedded all the Kahn Academy videos linked to from the resources page at ai-class.org. The readings are chapters from the class textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. I think now I'll work through the probability prerequisites and the readings before I take on the rest of the lectures for Week 2.
It's 7:25. I spent the early afternoon watching videos on the web. I watched Theorising from Data, reddit.com Interviews Peter Norvig, SIMS 141 - Peter Norvig: Google, Director of Search Quality by Professor Norvig and reddit.com Interviews Noam Chomsky by Noam Chomsky. The background of the Noam Chomsky video had a screensaver that flashed up words. I did my best at collating those words -- many of which I am unfamiliar with -- and creating a blog entry that lists them. I built the list with a program I hacked together this afternoon.
Then I started watching through some of the prerequisite videos from Kahn Academy listed on the AI class prerequisites. I got through the early probability stuff, but some of the later stuff eluded me. I also started watching the Linear Algebra review, and I felt way out of my depth. I felt like I had a better grasp on the concepts from the introductory work we did in the ML class. I commented a little on the aiqus web-site, but don't really feel like I have much that's interesting or productive on that forum. Both of the questions I asked had been fairly off-topic.
2011-10-21
It's 7:05pm on Friday. Today I had guests visit me at home, Phil and Adam, so didn't get much work done. I have been working through the week 2 lectures on probability, and I'm really lost. I need to spend a serious amount of time here getting to understand the maths, I think. Planning to work late into the night on the AI class this evening, but might sleep instead. Been playing a bit of StarCraft this afternoon/evening, so hopefully I stop doing that and get on with my probability theory.
Yesterday I posted to the aiqus forum about a weird spellcheck result for "Norvig" wherein the suggested replacement word was "ignore". I thought that was just too ironic so I posted to the forum. I think I got one upvote and four down-votes. I guess people weren't impressed. I certainly hope I haven't offended anyone, I was just trying to introduce some levity in the otherwise quite serious forum. I've been feeling bad about sending that comment today, because I guess people might take it in different ways; ways that I do not intend. Anyway, it's done now, so I'm just moving on. I'm not sure what my forum participation will be like during the course. I plan to try and read a little more of it than I have been, and am not sure if I will be asking or answering any questions.
2011-10-20
It's 11:32am on Thursday. This morning I did a little more transcription of notes for Week 1. I also refactored the design of my notes: now lecture notes are broken down by week rather than being on a single page. So AI class is the home page, and that links into the overview, journal, and weekly lectures; e.g. AI class week 1. The page for Week 1 was really long, and I didn't think it would be a great idea to load a page much larger than that, and definitely not ten times larger than that. There is a good index into weekly subjects on the home page AI class.
So I've still got shitloads of work to do, and haven't even managed to finish the Week 1 lecture notes yet, but I'm almost there. After that I have to do Week 2 -- this is getting tough! I've been focusing pretty much exclusively on the AI class lately, so I'm way behind on the ML class. Still hoping that maybe soon I'll be able to catch up.
It's 5:26pm on Thursday. Figured I'd log a little more about my day. I have been working on the AI class pretty much all day. Finished all the documentation for Week 1 including homework, and made a very small start on Week 2. I started working through the lectures for Week 2, and decided that I'm going to watch all the lectures from start to finish (doing the quizzes along the way) and then once I'm done go back over the whole thing and write up the notes. That will give me a chance to absorb the content the first time around, and then review the content while adding the lecture notes, and then review again even more deeply for the overview.
In doing the quiz for lecture 3.15 (Probability in AI -> Cancer 3) I got the wrong solution. I don't understand what went wrong, nor do I understand what was explained to me as the correct way to do it. I searched the Aiqus forum for a related question and found Question on Third Cancer Quiz to which I added a comment along the lines that I had made a similar mistake and had a similar misunderstanding. I hope someone will be able to disabuse me of my confusion.
I'm off to the city to see ProgSoc now, and I'm worried that maybe this week I won't have enough time to get all my AI class and ML class work done. I'm going to focus on the AI class first and catch up with the ML class if I can.
2011-10-19
It's 7:30am Wednesday morning. I've been up all night. Played StarCraft at first, but snapped out of it and for the last few hours have been putting up my AI class notes for week 1. It's half-way through week 2 already, and I'm only about 50% of the way through my notes for week 1. It's been harder putting the notes for the AI class together than it has been for the ML class, I think because I've felt the need for transcribing the lectures for the AI class, whereas in the ML class the odd screenshot seemed to sum up the content well enough. I haven't looked at the ML class for a while now, and I haven't done any homework for that class yet. I think maybe doing two subjects is too ambitious. Not planning to give up just yet though. I think if I have to choose between the classes I will pick the AI class, particularly because I bought the textbook for that class and I'd like to read it. Which reminds me: the recommended reading has been posted on the AI class web-site, but I haven't done any of the reading yet. Tomorrow I'm supposed to be going into the city to catch up with ProgSoc (for a talk on internet security) and on Friday I have friends visiting so my week looks like it's really full. Might have to cancel the ProgSoc thing so I can stay at home and study. We'll see how that goes. Am planning to continue with my AI class notes now.
It's now 1:44pm and I've been working away on my notes since my previous journal entry. I'm up to A* Search, there's not too much to go for week 1 after that. Unfortunately I'm having trouble accessing the course web-site http://ai-class.org at the moment because it has just been taken down for maintenance. So that gives me a pretty good excuse to go and play computer games! Hah! The other things I guess I could be doing are working on the ML class, or working on the AI class overview. Not sure what my next move will be. I'll probably put in another journal entry later in the day. Starting to feel a little weary here at the moment though.
2011-10-18
It's Tuesday morning, 6am (exactly, how about that). Yesterday I had an appointment at the doctor and I spent most of Sunday night trying to get to sleep but didn't. So I stayed up all night, but didn't get any work done. In the end it didn't matter, because they extended the deadline for the first week's homework and I got that done this morning. I'm not sure if I actually gave the correct answers for the homework, and have to say I didn't really think too hard about it. :P I just put in the first answers that sort of sprang to mind. I'm not sure if I'm the type of person who cares how a search algorithm evolves. :P I don't have a good understanding of the actual algorithms that were described during the course, i.e. with the "explored" list and "frontier" list, but I'm hoping that becomes clearer to me when I see an actual implementation or later in the course (although maybe I've already seen everything they plan to show us about these search methods, the course will probably move on). Anyway, the news is that I've got my homework submitted, and thanks to the extra day's time I got it in before the deadline. I have to do up my notes for about 60% of the AI class, and I've got some work to do for the ML class too, so maybe I'll get that done today.
2011-10-16
It's Sunday night, 10:10pm, and I've really dropped the ball. I stayed up all last night working on a checkers simulation inspired by the board shown in the lecture on checkers. This has meant that I have got hardly any of the lectures for the AI class done, and I'm behind in the ML class too. Both classes have homework due in the next few hours that I'm really not in a position to deliver. I think I'm just gonna suck it up and cop my bad grade. :( Tonight I hope I stop procrastinating by stuffing around with the checkers simulation and get on with the real work of lectures in the AI class. Let's see how I go.
2011-10-15
It's 6:11pm Saturday night. I started reviewing the AI class videos and doing the built-in quizzes earlier in the week, but I've just started putting my notes together tonight. Looks like I've got a shitload of confusing work to do!
I just checked out the videos on youtube, and for some reason I find it encouraging that only 43,456 people have watched the unit 0 introduction, and only 10,489 people have watched the unit 1 introduction, so the attrition rate is rather huge already. I had heard that 160,000 people had signed up for the course, so that seems like a massive attrition rate so far, which makes me feel like all I need to do in order to distinguish myself here is to actually finish the course!
I noticed on the course information page a link to someone's very artistic notes. Hopefully I can shanghai some of those graphics for incorporation into my own notes. Of all the people I hope finish the course I hope the author of these notes does!
Oh no. In addition to the above I checked out how many people have already watched Unit 2, Topic 34 on youtube (the last lecture for this first week), and it's only 956 people. So maybe there are less than about 1,000 people who are actually going to be doing the entire course, and that's just after the first week! That's dismaying rather than encouraging. On those numbers so far I wouldn't be surprised if the online course "graduates" less than the 200 people that Stanford graduates every year. My heart goes out to Professor Thrun, who seemed so excited about the magnitude of what he was undertaking. Perhaps this is why Professor Norvig didn't look at all enamoured during his introduction..? It has seemed to me like this was going to be a Very Big Deal, just imagine the positive impact it would have on the world at large to have "graduated" 160,000 (or even one third of that) people and put them into the programming world. The effect on the quality and quantity of software developed as a result would be exciting, but at this rate it looks like we'll be lucky to see the online course's effect as being any more significant than what Stanford manages to achieve every year.
I found and installed the EmbedVideo extension for MediaWiki and now have the youtube content embedded in my notes.