Just Started Harvard's CS50AI - Nostalgia!

 Last year I had taken Harvard's CS50x, and upon completing that unforgettable experience I just knew I had to take CS50AI. And so today, I came back to the CS50 world that feels so much like home.

CS50 AI has quite a similar structure to CS50x, as in there is a two hour lecture followed by a problem set (which in CS50AI is called a 'Project'). CS50AI also has quizzes, unlike the flagship course, and the lecture is conducted by Professor Brian Yu rather than Professor David J. Malan. On coming back to my GitHub CS50 Code space, seeing all the code from last year completely flooded me with nostalgia - as I put all those files into separate folder, and mkdir-ed a new CS50AI folder eager to venture into this new journey.

Noticeable Differences

In the first 'Week', you can see quite a increase in content level compared to CS50x, which was to be expected as CS50AI is crafted to build upon expertise in CS50x concepts. I have only watched the first lecture today, and done the first week's project, and I can say that I have learned so much in depth about 'Searching' in AI - from the basics like DFS, BFS to previously unknown concepts to me like Minimax, and Alpha-Beta Pruning. And for the 'degrees' project we had to implement our own search algorithm to create a program to find the shortest connection between any two actors by choosing a sequence of movies that connects them. And for the Tic  Tac Toe Project we had to create an AI powered tic-tac-toe game using Minimax.

And I really like this increase in level of learning and difficulty, as in CS50x, the course went into details into the fundamentals of all the concepts we learned creating a strong foundation for us. And now that the strong foundation is build, CS50AI really reaches for the skies - as the course doesn't go as much into depth into every small concept - it assumes you know the fundamentals - and really serves you a great feast of AI oriented information for you to devour.

AI being a field that really interests me, I am so excited to experience CS50AI! :)