CS373

I just started CS373: Artifical Intelligence for Robotics, which is Sebastian Thrun‘s robot car course on Udacity.

Thrun is an Elon Musk-type, who has been wildly successful in a number of disparate domains — Stanford professor, father of the self-driving car, Udacity CEO. There’s a lot to say about Thrun on another occasion, but here I’ll focus on the Udacity robotics course.

This is the first course I have taken on the Udacity platform, and I am really impressed by what they have put together. The format is a big advance over the lectures I listened to in college.

For one, Thurn has moved way beyond putting his PowerPoint slides into a YouTube video and doing a voiceover. Instead, Thrun is basically doing a very polished whiteboard presentation, specially crafted for the Udacity format. Which means we’re not looking at Thurn standing at a whiteboard, but rather we’re looking at his hand (or that of a hand model), drawing out well-contained lessons.

But the big step forward is the constant quiz and feedback mode. Every 1–2 minutes, Thrun will ask a quiz questions, to verify we’re still following along. Sometimes it’s a multiple-choice question; often it’s a toy programming problem which requires we write 2–5 lines of Python in the context of a larger program that he gives us.

Thrun is very enthusiastic, constantly telling us how amazing and remarkable we are as students, to have so quickly programmed up a toy version of the Google self-driving car localization algorithm.

In reality, I think it is Thrun who has built something quite remarkable.

Originally published at www.davidincalifornia.com on October 5, 2015.