(no subject)
I was pleasantly astonished to see Peter Norvig comment on my recent post about the Stanford online courses - with 160,000 students competing for his attention, that's dedication! I completely take his point that I'm only a small part of the intended audience, and what works best for me is probably not what works best for the students they really want to reach.
Nevertheless, the course has sped up in the last couple of weeks to the point where I'm finding it pleasantly stretching. Today I tweeted:I take it back: #aiclass is covering the Oxford 1st-year logic course in <1wk. The good bits of the syllabus, anyway :-)
I want to expand on that remark a bit. There were actually three first-year Oxford logic courses:
I always thought they'd have been better splitting ItSL and EoDL into two more evenly-sized courses - perhaps one heavily mathematical one, to be shared with the CS students (and perhaps incorporating some digital electronics), followed by a purely philosophical one to be taken by the (Maths|Physics) & Philosophy students. Meanwhile the algebra-phobes could do a single course more tailored to their level. I'm guessing that resource availability ruled this idea out, though.
There was also a two-term second-year maths course called "b1 Foundations", which was set theory, logic (up to, IIRC, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem and Skolem's paradox) and some computability theory. This was compulsory for Maths & Philosophy students, but I didn't take it because I'd given up philosophy by then and was sick of the whole thing. In light of my subsequent career, this was probably a bad decision.
Nevertheless, the course has sped up in the last couple of weeks to the point where I'm finding it pleasantly stretching. Today I tweeted:I take it back: #aiclass is covering the Oxford 1st-year logic course in <1wk. The good bits of the syllabus, anyway :-)
I want to expand on that remark a bit. There were actually three first-year Oxford logic courses:
- "Introduction to Symbolic Logic", taught in the first term to all Philosophy students (including those like me who were studying Maths and Philosophy), and also a few others like Classics students. This covered propositional logic, first-order predicate logic, proof tableaux, and endless pointless arguments about the precise meaning of the word "the" and whether or not the symbol → accurately captures the meaning of the English word "if". This is the course I was talking about on Twitter. I found it unbearably slow-paced, but I remember a couple of folk who'd given up maths years before and couldn't handle being asked to do algebra again. "The alarm is sounding and Mary called" was fine, but "A & M" was apparently unintelligible to them.
According to a legend which was told to me by the Warden of New College and is thus of unquestionable veracity, a class of ItSL students were once sent to the Wykeham Professor of Logic's graduate-level logic seminar due to a scheduling error. The WPoL walked in, saw the expected roomful of youngsters, and started "Let L be a language recursively defined over an alphabet X..." The poor undergrads, still in their first week (and quite possibly at their first class) of their undergraduate careers, must have started to entertain grave doubts about their ability to handle this "Oxford" place. When the WPoL was eventually informed of the mistake, he is supposed to have meditatively said "I thought they seemed rather ill-prepared..." - "Elements of Deductive Logic", taught in the second term to those studying (Maths|Physics) and Philosophy. This bumped the mathematical content up a notch, covering (for instance) completeness and consistency theorems for the languages that had been introduced in ItSL. There was also a rather handwavy treatment of modal logic, and lots more philosophical wrangling about what it all meant and how relevant it was to the broader philosophical project. This was one of the most intense courses I did in my four years as an undergrad.
- There was an introduction to symbolic logic buried somewhere in the first-year computer science course - without the philosophy, I'm assuming.
I always thought they'd have been better splitting ItSL and EoDL into two more evenly-sized courses - perhaps one heavily mathematical one, to be shared with the CS students (and perhaps incorporating some digital electronics), followed by a purely philosophical one to be taken by the (Maths|Physics) & Philosophy students. Meanwhile the algebra-phobes could do a single course more tailored to their level. I'm guessing that resource availability ruled this idea out, though.
There was also a two-term second-year maths course called "b1 Foundations", which was set theory, logic (up to, IIRC, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem and Skolem's paradox) and some computability theory. This was compulsory for Maths & Philosophy students, but I didn't take it because I'd given up philosophy by then and was sick of the whole thing. In light of my subsequent career, this was probably a bad decision.