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To start, I'm not a programmer/computer scientist/et al... - I work in Finance and have, through my job, self-thought myself VBA for excel and outlook and would consider myself as being in the upper half of the population of people who write VBA creating browser apps for scraping (and interpreting site's DOMs in doing so), creating Arrays of multi-dimensional arrays (arrays of 3D arrays - haven't gone for a 4D array as I haven't needed to) and generally focused on making as efficient macros. I've (very) basic understanding of JAVA also (I even created an basic android app!).

By pure accident, learning the above has given me a massive interest in all thing related to IT developments and the massive development which I truly believe will be the development in Human History (for better or worse has yet to be determined!) is AI.

I want to know all that I can about AI so was wondering if you all could assist an absolute noob on the subject. I know nothing of Python (which seems the language of choice for AI) but anything that would help would be great.

I'm not completely naive to the fact the brightest minds in the IT world are are working on this and concepts are going to be difficult for someone like me but I'm willing to try!

Any and all help/suggestions are welcome!

Thanks in advance.

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  • $\begingroup$ Try MIT OpenCourseWare's AI lectures! $\endgroup$ – kiner_shah Sep 20 '17 at 10:12
  • $\begingroup$ It seems that you are asking about AI programming, and tags focus more on ML. Is this correct? If so, could you refine your title? These change will help people provide more useful and practical answers. $\endgroup$ – Eric Platon Sep 21 '17 at 10:36
  • $\begingroup$ @EricPlaton it really an all-encompassing question (from he programming languages to the theory behind how Machine learning) - with regard to the deep learning piece, I watched a video on youtube on a UK company which was recently bought by Google (I believe they were called DeepBlue) and they were explaining that process with which they had created an general AI which went on to beat one of the greatest GO players in the the world $\endgroup$ – Jeremy Sep 21 '17 at 11:17
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    $\begingroup$ @Jeremy I think we are not on the same page.I would kindly request you to go through this Artificial Intelligence $\endgroup$ – quintumnia Sep 21 '17 at 16:30
  • $\begingroup$ @Jeremy Your question is definitely important, and the community here wishes to help you. There is a problem: Your question is way to broad to give meaningful answers. Theory and programming are both whole worlds on their own. Also, Q&A sites like this one aim at building up knowledge that is stable over time. What you are asking is evolving, fast. So narrower questions are more useful to the community, and I think to you too. Please see what quintumnia links to. And please believe this is really to provide better feedbacks to you and all. $\endgroup$ – Eric Platon Sep 22 '17 at 0:47
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I think the best approach would be to pick up a good book that lays out the fundamentals very well.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (AIMA) is a great place to begin with! It is used as a reference textbook for many university level AI courses. It has helped me quite a lot as a student.

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  • $\begingroup$ Welcome to AI! How is this book in terms of recent breakthroughs? (i.e. it came out a little bit before Giraffe Chess and AlphaGo.) $\endgroup$ – DukeZhou♦ Sep 21 '17 at 21:45
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    $\begingroup$ I think the book lays out the foundations for us to understand the more advanced concepts in recent breakthroughs. It doesn't cover much of AlphaGo and GiraffeChess. :) $\endgroup$ – xbili Sep 22 '17 at 7:33
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Second the recommendation for "AI: A Modern Approach". Outside of that, there are a ton of resources online to consider. I think a good start would include:

  1. Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera (note: I mean the old course, not the "Deep Learning Specialization" which I have no experience with).

  2. The Berkeley CS188 course materials here: http://ai.berkeley.edu/home.html

  3. Professor P. Daspguta's AI lectures here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLbMPyrw4rw&list=PLvx5ei9aEEqJBDBLV3ELK4PKEgnFeOrw6

  4. Read some (or all if you have a lot of time on your hands) of the "AI Letters" from MIT. http://publications.csail.mit.edu/ai/

  5. The past Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) are available as well. Browsing those could be interesting once you have some basics down. https://www.ijcai.org/past_proceedings

  6. There's an older, 4 volume series titled "The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence". It's long out of print, but used copies are readily available on Amazon. It deals with older techniques that aren't necessarily "en vogue" today, but may still be important either for perspective, or because those techniques are just waiting to be rediscovered.

  7. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence by Philip C. Jackson.

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    $\begingroup$ Andrew Ng is the king of it like mindcrime said That said, if you're not great at multi variable mathematics, matrices, and derivatives, that would be a better place to start so you understand the principles of it like linear gradients and k means clustering $\endgroup$ – BuddyWhy Sep 20 '17 at 15:02
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For informal viewing, computerphile has some videos from AI researchers, and there are videos about deepdream which image recognition from google. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qfIgCiYlfY

From a programming perspective, you should learn about NN because it's made to imitate neuron arrangements, it's the most established field for programming neurons. Neural Networks have various types which are all difficult to program, I don't know if deep blue chess program even used it, other means may still be more efficient.

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