Stuff that students in my DEAR AI class might find useful and/or fun. I’ll add more materials for each class session as we go. The course is on Zoom, Wednesdays from 9:45-10:45 AM, starting on October 28, with no class on Veteran’s Day, November 11.
Session 1: History & Hype (10/28)
- Turing Test Paper – Alan Turing’s original paper on the Imitation Game from 1950, which I referred to in the lecture. Turing’s original formulation of what became the Turing Test was a bit convoluted, but it’s still a fun party game!
- I. J. “Jack” Good – Fascinating and largely forgotten figure who worked with Turing at Bletchley Park, advised on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and predicted an “intelligence explosion” in 1965. This 2015 remembrance is from Virginia Tech, where he landed in 1967 as a Distinguished Professor.
- Dartmouth Conference Proposal – Original proposal for the Dartmouth “Summer of AI” Conference in 1956. This is where the term Artificial Intelligence first appeared.
- The Thinking Machine – 1961 TV show from CBS/MIT that I actually remember seeing as a kid (I must have been 10). Features some of the Dartmouth Conference attendees, with actor David Wayne as the host. Really dated in a fun way.
- Google Data Centers – Talk about fast forward… The Google company line on their data centers, which are mind-blowing in their scale, complexity and computing power.
- Melanie Mitchell’s website – The author of AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans, which I highly recommend as the best recent book on AI for general audiences. She is knowledgable, lucid, and hype-resistant: you can’t ask for more! The book is in the Monroe County Library system, but last time I looked, Penfield didn’t have a copy. She has links to several places you can buy it.
Session 2: Games (11/4)
- AlphaGo – The Movie (2017) – Excellent 90-minute documentary on DeepMind’s development of AlphaGo, culminating in the match with 18-time world champion Lee Sedol in 2016.
- Deep Thinking (39 minutes) – Engaging interview of Garry Kasparov by DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis in 2017 during Kasparov’s tour for his book, Deep Thinking. Nice perspective on the Deep Blue match 20 years later.
- How Checkers Was Solved – Atlantic article on checkers program Chinook and Marion “Two Ton” Tinsdale, the greatest checkers player who ever lived. No real AI involved, but a rather poignant bookend on machine efforts to play checkers.
Session 3: Vision & Neural Networks (11/18)
- Machine Learning for Artists: Excellent site with presentations on neural nets that get into some of the math, along with lots of cool demos, including the following 4, which should look familiar…
- CIFAR/MNIST Classification Demo: Browse through individual testing images and see all 10 activations
- CIFAR/MNIST Confusion Matrix Demo: Compare no hidden layer to convolutional nets for both data sets
- CIFAR/MNIST Weights Demo: Watch the weights move as training proceeds on nets with no hidden layer and 1 hidden layer
- Convolution Demo: For different filters, move the window around MNIST images and see the convolution value for each location
Session 4: Natural Language Processing (11/25)
- Oxford English Dictionary: Official site of the cathedral of English
- Google Translate: Open this in 2 different browser windows so that you can translate English to some target language and then back to English to see if it mangled anything. Try poetry or song lyrics, and/or use an obscure target language.
