AI Hurties

So yeah, if I haven't complained to you about AI "COMP3620", then you don't know me very well. But for your sake, I'll indulge you.

At the beginning of this year, I had a choice between two courses:
- Artificial Intelligence (COMP3620), or
- Operating Systems (COMP3300)

I'd heard that the OS course was quite difficult (having to write a kernel module is one of the assignments), so I decided to pick AI.

ANU Rule #1: NEVER choose a course that's never been run before.
Okay, well, perhaps this is an ANU Department of Computer Science rule, I'm not sure how it is in other faculties. Why do I say never to choose a course that's never been run before?

Because the lecturers have no clue. Most of you who do a COMP course know that the lecturers already have no clue. They're airy-fairy, head-in-clouds academics who think that UML is "the shit".

Well, one of the first things you learn in AI that almost everything you're going to learn in this course is theoretical and you'll never be able to use it. Logic Knowledgebases, for example.

Okay, now keeping this in mind, imagine that the lecturers have now never taught this course before. Oh, I forgot to mention, imagine your lecturer is from some Reasearch School that noone's ever heard of.

Anyhow, so, every two weeks, you get a lab for AI, which you have to submit in a week. Each of these labs is treated like an assigmnent (the workload is similar to a medium-sized assignment). For example, in one of the labs, we had to write a program which played "Connect 4", with an optimum strategy (basically, so it always wins). Or in another lab, we had to write a program which plays the "Asteroids" game via VNC (basically, using live screenshots -- so you don't even know what direction the ship's pointing in).

Anyway, to conclude this rant, having failed every single lab for AI (which was only worth a measely 30% anyway), I sat the 70% exam for it this morning.

Needless to say, I failed. Fuck you ANU. Fuck you DCS. You're all fucktards who can go to hell.