Brain Thaw
30 Oct 2011After writing my last post, I again worked my arse off this week to study both the Stanford AI and ML classes in a less crunchy fashion than the week before. Unfortunately the crunch avoidance did not come to pass and I was up until 3am this morning (well, 2am if you take into account the clocks going back :-) cramming on AI.
Since I actually want to learn about AI (and apply it to weak) I am not finding this cramming aspect of the study particularly beneficial. In my experience, cramming simply wears you out and gets you ready for a given short-term task (e.g. homework, later exams) before the information you’ve learned largely plops out of your brain.
For that reason, and for the sake of keeping this doable, I’ve decided to drop the machine learning course and focus fully on AI. There is an irony in that - I have found the AI work to be considerably more involved and challenging than machine learning (that’s not a comment on the relative quality of one course vs. the other by the way), however a. AI is of more relevance to what I want to do, and b. focusing on one thing reduces the stressful feeling of distraction that maintaing another course which requires homework, etc. brings.
I am still very interested in machine learning, so I might very well go over the machine learning course material at a later date. Additionally, the AI course contains some cross-over material so I won’t do entirely without.
Another aspect is that I would like to maintain my notes to a better standard than I have (and which more time would allow me to achieve), rather than having to rush them out because of time constraints. There are almost certainly better notes for the course out there, however there is nothing quite like having a set of notes to refer to you which you’ve written in your own style and to your own tastes. Not invented here syndrome, perhaps!
Meta-Blog Tediousness
On an entirely different subject, you may have noticed I’ve deleted a number of posts. This is because I felt they were of little value and often quite negative. This blog is meant to be a diary of where I’m at in my tech life, and yes that involves both positive and negative, however there is nothing more tedious than wading through either rather mediocre technical posts, or moany personal ones. I’d like to maximise the chances of me (and to some degree others of course :-) actually enjoying reading this blog.
I can only apologise to those few whose comments have consequently been deleted from this site. Hopefully you can understand why I’ve done it.