Picking classes
It’s already that time again – time to pick classes for next term! (I haven’t even taken my midterms yet.) I know that I’m going to take Relational Database Management and Algorithm Design/Analysis. I have 5 classes that I have to decide on for my third class, but really I’m leaning towards either Parallel Programming or Advanced AI: Combinatorial Search. The latter sounds pretty awesome, but it would mean that I have evening classes three nights a week – and I wonder if the Parallel Programming class would be more useful? I’ve learned about parallel programming, but never actually done any.
But will you have Mondays free!? : )
Parallel programming is an important topic with many real-world applications. It will become steadily more important as processors scale not in clock frequency but in number of cores: having eight cores is nice, but useless when you can only make full use of one of them. We seem to be running up against fundamental limits of frequency scaling, so I think multi-core designs are here to stay.
On the other hand, you’re very unlikely to be able to apply anything learned in any course with “AI” in the title to projects in industry. Such techniques are generally considered too risky or unreliable for commercial work, or simply to complex to be maintainable. They’re fun (sometimes a lot of fun), but unless you’re steering for perpetual academia, you’ll get more mileage out of parallel programming.
Sara – Well, it depends!
Mithrandir – that’s kind of what I was thinking. The AI course sounds fun, but at this point I should be focusing on things that will be useful in the real world/industry. There’s actually another course in the running: Malware. It looks good, too! This is an old course webpage – they don’t have a current one. I’m still leaning towards the Parallel Programming course, I think.