A novel approach to teaching artificial intelligence

Every two years, Montana State University offers a course entitled “Advanced Artificial Intelligence”. In the spring of 1994, I selected artificial life as the organizing theme and allowed both computer science students (seniors and graduate students) and university honors students with no background in computer science (sophomores, juniors and seniors) to enroll. My motivation for doing this stemmed from wanting to see how far one could go in connecting one area of computer science (namely, artificial intelligence) not only with other areas of computer science [Paxt on, Ross, Starkey 1994], but also with other academic areas. Allowing honors students to enroll in the course ensured that the cross-disciplinary goals of the course would be addressed. Artificial life studies life as it could be. As a consequence, it attracts an extremely diverse set of followers including biologists, artists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, philosophers and others. Many areas of artificial intelligence are highly relevant to the study of artificial life (neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc. ) and hence, it is easy to justify using artificial life as an organizing topic for a course in advanced artificial intelligence. However, because artificial life encompasses much more than just the study of intelligence, it is ideally suited for a course with a diverse audience. Artificial life allows computer science students to bring their computer science expertise to bear while enabling them to learn about many areas outside the traditional purview of computer science, Similarly, artificial life allows honors students to bring their breadth of experience to the course while enabling them to learn about a very important technical field that might have sweeping impact upon future human society. Thus, every student can be both a learner and a teacher.