If You Can Cook You Can Code Vol 5: Artificial Intelligence

2016 was the year of AI. 

Kevin Kelly has stated that AI is going to make even bigger changes to the economy than the internet.

If you missed out on the internet dot com bubble of the late 90s and early 2000s, now is your chance.

AI is coming, and it's coming fast.

And AI is also one of the most difficult things to learn.

It's not taught well.

Once you get past a Wikipedia article the next step is a 1000 page textbook that will take a year to read plus learning a bunch of new fields of math and programming. 

This course is designed to give you a birds eye view of the entire field of AI, with many of the coolest and cutting edge breakthroughs included along the way.

You will learn what AI is through 4 stages.

The first is Measurement. This is the aspect of AI that involves getting information into the computer, the brain, the AI, so that it can be processed. It's the process that the eyes and ears and other senses help serve for us humans and other animals who have various degrees of intelligence.

The next step is Learning. A key aspect of intelligence is that an intelligent person or animal or computer has to be able to learn over time so that it doesn't keep making the same mistakes over and over. And ideally, the AI becomes something that can learn without a person always teaching it everything and looking over it's shoulder. It should be able to learn on it's own. That is where Machine Learning comes into play. You'll get an in depth overview of Machine Learning with plenty of examples.

The third stage is Planning. This is the task the AI takes on where it has to decide what to do. It has to make a decision. It has to prepare to take action by looking at the various options and choosing the best one based on some kind of formula, with some metric of success to maximize. How does that all work? You'll learn all about it here.

The final stage is action. How does the computer act in the real world. This is primarily the area of robotics. How do you create motors, also called "actuators" in AI parlance, that will make the AI more than just another window running on your computer? How do you create a self driving car or a robot that can walk around or express emotions on it's "face" while in conversation? You'll learn about how robots act in the real world, and some of the interesting state of the art applications in this section.

For those of you who have been following along in this series, you're going to have a lot of breakthroughs here where you see some of the lower level ideas and concepts from the previous courses start to really help you understand at a deeper level how a lot of the newest technology actually works under the hood. 

See you inside,

Timothy