Mr_Confused: My BSc was at Essex uni, not greatly regarded for CS or AI, but my course was mostly CS in the first year, half and half second year and mostly AI third year. The courses were the standard AI type, planning, ALife, neural nets, GAs, expert systems, machine vision etc.
My MSc was in Evolutionary and Adaptive systems at Sussex universty, a better regarded university for behaviour based robotics and the study of evolution. Most of the courses covered GAs in some way or other and there was a lot of neural network stuff.
You can find out more at the Univerties'' web sites.

Mike

quote: Original post by fup
AI is an infant topic ...

I think this statement is misleading...

If you compare AI to say differential calculus, then yes, I would agree that AI is ''young'' by comparison, but I wouldn''t suggest that AI is in its infancy...

That might have been true back in the 40s when Turing, von Nuemann and others were first thinking up all the wonderful things you could do with computers (Did you know that Turing was actually the first to describe what we now call an artificial neural network??!!) but I wouldn''t say it is the case today. AI is a major endeavour in CS... you would be hard pressed to find a CS department that didn''t do even a little AI!

Anyway, enough of my breast-beating and foot stomping!

Cheers,

Timkin

Almost any new science of this century is an infant topic in my opinion. What I was getting at though is that there is a lot of scope for exploration in the field of AI/A-Life. Just because something is a major endeavour does not make that thing well known.

Yes I did know about Allen Turings fondness for complex systems built from small simple modules. Although I thought McCulloch and Pitts got there before him with the phrase "neural network" in their 1943 paper?



Stimulate

My apologies if it seemed I was suggesting Turing coined the term 'neural network'. That is not the case... I was simply alluding to the fact that he, according to my source, was one of the first to work on the idea of a neural network. Tis a pity he died... and that ANNs were put aside for about 30 years until the late 70s/early 80s... (although Im not trying to infer this happened {i]because of his death!) who knows where we might have gotten to by now!

Cheers,

Timkin

[edited by - Timkin on April 11, 2002 10:55:46 PM]

All the greats seem to die young. It''s such a shame. Reminds me of a quote from a film..

"The candle that burns twice as bright only burns half as long, but you have burnt so very brightly Roy"

Recognize it?

I don''t know for sure who first coined the term ''neural network'' Tim, although around the late 30''s, early 40''s a lot of the great pioneers of AI were thinking along the lines of building complex systems from very small modules. Turing, John Von Neumann, Pitts McCulloch and others were all having their own little thoughts on the topic. Although Turing was more or less isolated at Bletchley Park during the war a lot of the others were mingling at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study which sounded like a very creative place to be at the time. Still does in fact.






Stimulate

So far 3 years of computer sciences at TU-delft in the Netherlands. Became interested after a course ''Neural Networks'' in the second year and have been programming AI-algorithms ever since.

see ya,

Edo

I''m only a high-school senior, and last year I took AP Computer Science and taught the teacher how to program. I read gamedev articles, and tutorials by people like fup and nehe.
How''s that for qualificiations? =-)


"I believe; therefore, it is." -True Perception
"The Requested Information Is Unknown Or Classified" -Anonymous

quote: "The candle that burns twice as bright only burns half as long, and you have burnt so very brightly Roy"

Stimulate

Blade Runner



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Stimulate

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Stimulate