- All lectures were pre-recorded, which I thought was super convenient, since I could watch them at 1.25x speed.
- I thought the lectures were generally very clear. Some of the content was not new, however. We went over some search algorithms from CS 32/180, and there was probability that was taught in Stats 100A (or equivalent).
- We had 5 homework assignments, which were all very reasonable. One of them was considerably harder than the others and took a lot more time.
- Overall, I thought the course was enjoyable. I didn't need to dedicate too much time to do well in the course. The midterm exams weren't super easy but they were doable. Going over the discussion section slides and the lecture examples was helpful. (I didn't read the textbook, so I can't comment on how helpful it is.)

During the Covid Era, This professor decided to prerecord his lectures weekly and post them at the scheduled lecture time, then have a weekly office hours of sorts, where you can go and ask questions after lecture. It definitely worked well for a while, but I found that the q/a sessions would be less and less helpful as time went on. The LISP projects are seemingly required by the department for the class, and just feel outdated and untouched. However, they will give you great functional programming practice that will help you in cs131. Tests are very concept based, and the homework projects/lecture videos will not help you, you will need to read the book for the details needed to answer the test questions. He is a good professor but I cant help but feel like we wasted a lot of time in the class focusing on logic as taught in Phil 31, and search algorithms as taught in cs180.

Terrible class. Do not take with this professor. Curve is ridiculous. Final is the stupidest CS test I've taken at this school. Material is severely outdated.

Course SHOULD have started with A* search, skipped the logic sections, and focused more heavily on machine learning, NLP, and CV. Everything else is covered in other CS classes at this school (CS180 covers all the search algorithms, CS131 covers Prolog and logic programming, and CS181 rounds out everything else).

Truly a waste of time and effort.

This class is pretty easy. Lectures are sometimes confusing as we does not elaborate on important topics and breezes by them without clarification. But there are a lot of resources online (ppts on our textbook for example) to study from, so it is not too hard to study for this class. Tests are fairly easy (final was MC, and ppl just finished in half the time and left). Pretty interesting class that could be taught better.

I thought this class was very well done! Professor van Den Broeck does an excellent job of explaining the material in an easy to understand way. At the end of the class I thought I had a good introduction to different aspects of AI. The homework and exams were also very fair and very doable. Overall I would definitely recommend this course, I learned a lot and it definitely wasn't a huge amount of work.

Overall this class was pretty average. Not bad but not good either. I'd still probably take it again but if I had other interesting classes available I'd probably opt for those instead.
In the pro category, Guy is a pretty decent lecturer. He does a good job of going over the points, explaining it clearly, and making sure the class gets it. Only thing I didn't like is he mixes powerpoint slides with drawing on the board, so as someone who likes to just refer to online notes it's a bit of a pain. Also I thought the tests were fine. The midterm was just problems that were covered in homeworks or class. The final was multiple choice, and although I understand the point a lot of the other reviews made here, I thought generally the questions were ok. They mostly wanted you to think critically about the concepts rather than just memorize them all. Also generally speaking the homeworks don't take that long to do, so this wasn't as time consuming as some other CS classes can be.
On the con side, the class is poorly organized, and at least for this quarter I thought the TAs were not good. I stopped going to discussion because my TA seemed to mostly confuse people or not know what they were talking about. They are also pretty poor at responding to stuff like homework questions, scheduling the release and deadlines for the homeworks, grading in a timely fashion, etc. And for the midterm they made you go to a specific TA's office hours to get regrades for each question, so essentially everyone had to go to 3 separate office hours. And in my opinion they graded poorly and would take away points for arbitrary reasons.

He is a nice guy and care about students' learning, but his lectures are not very clear. In fact, this is one of a few classes that I think are on par with Eggert's CS 33. It is very hard to follow sometimes and I have no idea what's important to write down. Basically, If you don't spend time reading that textbook, you will probably have trouble understanding concepts.

The first two homework are too easy (Lisp coding that can be finished in 10 minutes), and the last two are a disaster.
Homework 3 as far as I know no one received 100. Basically after spending several hours optimizing routines and heuristics will give you a score of 94.2 instead of 94.
Homework 5 and 6 are like math questions. They are pretty good, and they really help me understand what resolution, markov assumption, etc. are. However, solutions are never posted, and we pretty much have no idea what's going on after we submit our homework. Due to students' constant requests, the TA inputted what questions we did wrong and how much points were taken off like near 12am of the final exam. But, I can't comment on how helpful they turn out to be.

The final exam is all multiple choices. It is very anti-south campus. If you are good at memorizing stuff, you can get 90+ for not understanding any math, logic or coding; If you are not good at it, like me, you are most likely screwed.

In the end, I am pretty frustrated with this course. This AI course seems too traditional. It focuses too much on search (why not talk about it in 180?) and logic (not everyone has taken Philosophy 31), and talks too little about current learning algorithms. Homework and exams are probably reused so solutions are never posted, which means if you did something wrong, you will probably be still confused about why you did it wrong after the class is over. In the end, I can safely say I hardly learned anything after struggling through the whole quarter. As a reference, I have a 4.0 GPA for all CS classes before this quarter.

Overall the class was pretty good. The lectures were entertaining and the homework assigned wasn't too bad. However, the final was supposedly concept-based, but had a lot of definition/memorization based questions.

Not sure why there are some bad reviews, but for the online version, I thought it was pretty good. Everything was prerecorded so every lecture was very efficient and easy to follow. The homeworks aren't too stressful either. Nothing on the midterm or final that was unfair or not taught -- it was very reasonable. Definitely recommend taking it with this prof.

Originally posted a positive official course evaluation, changed my mind after the final.

So many things pointed to it being a practical problem solving exam, including this quote from the study guide: "Questions will test for insight and understanding. I will not ask historical or encyclopedic information", the midterm and last two homeworks (and associated lectures) being practical problems, and the allowance of calculators on the exam.

Guess what the exam was on.

Yes, he's not obliged to make things easy, and all the questions were things that were taught, and it probably wasn't intentionally malicious, but if you take his class beware surprises or trying to guess what might be on the final.

Rant aside, he's an alright lecturer, teaches from the book but keeps things logically connected (in the sense that he teaches the book's topics and examples rather than reading paragraph summaries). If you don't have the book, you can do alright off of his lectures, but his examples might have no lead-up since they're from the book which spends a bit more time laying out the problem.

Homeworks are in lisp, except the last ones which are practical problems. Overall they're pretty great in that they give an intuitive feel for the topics (besides final, see above). Generally, they have good "pacing" in that you can finish one function at a time, and see how they all come together. Minor quibbles with specific homeworks, one had a heuristic competition aspect, where only #1 got 100%, and the slowest got at most 80%, another had no way of telling if you were on the right track since you plugged outputs into a blackbox solver. The problem sets were good questions, but no solutions were posted afterwards, making them a bit useless for studying.

Class materials were not too great, the study guides had some issues besides the above, they were basically the syllabus list with a little more detail. No slides or lecture notes, the study guides mostly just let you google AI topics without getting bogged down in sci-fi or news articles.