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A comment on Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence. Parent comment

Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by Retric on Thursday May 10, 2018 @04:28PM (#17042667)
Most CS programs have a lot of filler from the Math department and various other places. Your third semester of Calculus for example. So, I think their is plenty of room for 6-8+ AI focused classes which would get you reasonably far. Especially if it's a comprehensive major that covers both Major and Minor requirements.
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by smallnamespace on Thursday May 10, 2018 @04:33PM (#17042708)
Not sure how you're going to have someone understand gradient descent and backprop without having a strong command of multivariable calculus.
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by lallysingh on Thursday May 10, 2018 @04:49PM (#17042833)
I'd assume you take multivariate, but skip on programming languages, digital design, and operating systems.
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by Retric on Thursday May 10, 2018 @04:42PM (#17042777)
Going from 1 variable to 2 or 20 never seemed like a big jump to me. I can see taking 1-2 weeks to go over it quickly, but you don't need a lot of problem set's to get it.

It's like learning a new computer language, it takes about as long to do that on it's own as to have a class in something else that happens to use your that new language.

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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by beojan on Thursday May 10, 2018 @04:48PM (#17042823)
Line / surface / volume integrals are certainly a jump from one-variable integrals.
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by fooker on Thursday May 10, 2018 @04:57PM (#17042906)
Not a big jump, if you conceptually stick to the 'area under curve' definition.

Analytically computing surface/volume integrals, yes, that is a big jump. But I don't understand why students need to memorize N algorithms and M substitution rules for that.

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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by woopwoop on Thursday May 10, 2018 @05:53PM (#17043280)
What is the straightforward "area under the curve" definition of a line integral?
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by fooker on Thursday May 10, 2018 @05:55PM (#17043292)
Wikipedia has a nice animation for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_integral#/media/File:Line...

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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by woopwoop on Thursday May 10, 2018 @06:11PM (#17043385)
Okay. I am used to this being called a path integral, and the phrase line integral being reserved for the integral of a vector field over a curve. This does not, as far as I know, admit a straightforward definition as an area under a curve.
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by fooker on Thursday May 10, 2018 @06:17PM (#17043426)
If you replace area under curve with volume under surface, it seems to me that the same intuition holds.
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by gowld on Thursday May 10, 2018 @08:13PM (#17043979)
Sure, and AI isn't a big jump from statistics.
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by fooker on Friday May 11, 2018 @08:03AM (#17046603)
I would say AI:Statistics :: Engineering:Physics .

Sometimes it is a big jump, sometimes it is all common sense.

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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by fooker on Thursday May 10, 2018 @04:55PM (#17042887)
I don't get this focus on 'maths via arcane problem solving' either.
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by asdsa5325 on Thursday May 10, 2018 @05:25PM (#17043101)
They taught gradient descent in my lower division math courses in college.
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by SamReidHughes on Thursday May 10, 2018 @06:08PM (#17043375)
Multivariable calculus is a lower-division math class.
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by scott_russell on Thursday May 10, 2018 @10:53PM (#17044663)
yep, softmore level math.
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Re:Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artifici... by gowld on Thursday May 10, 2018 @08:12PM (#17043974)
The CMU AI degree includes 3rd-semester calculus: one course each of numerical integration and linear algebra.

It cuts out the hardware/OS/compilers/networking part in order to make room for a very wide "minor" in AI.

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