CS 1710 - Introduction to Cognitive Science

General Information

Not really a “CS course” in the sense that it is far from a technical course, but it’s crosslisted in the department nevertheless. Briefly covers Turing machines and Claude Shannon’s information theory, and introduces extremely basic machine learning ideas. Discusses artificial intelligence (in large part from a philosophical perspective) for a fairly significant period of time. As a whole, the class is interesting, fairly easy, not at all work-intensive, and worth taking if you’ve got some extra space in your schedule, especially if you’re interested in artificial intelligence / philosophy of computing / psychology / linguistics / etc. Plus, it fulfills a humanities requirement.

Prerequisites

None

Topics Covered

Workload

Very little. There are two exams: 1 prelim and 1 final. The exams focus heavily on lecture not the readings so if you go to lecture and pay attention you can do well.

General Advice

Going to lecture is advised although not necessary. The lecture notes are posted and pretty compressive. TakeNote is available some semesters and makes going to lecture even less necessary.

For engineering students: This can be taken as a liberal studies requirement and can be taken pass/fail.

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