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Comment by kennethfriedman | Hacker News Reader

Professor Winston (the lecture in these videos), also teaches a higher-level, seminar based AI reading class called "The Human Intelligence Enterprise".

It too, is an incredible class. Here's the schedule & linked papers from last semester: https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/schedule.html

(Disclaimer: Professor Winston is my current advisor)

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Could you recommend any good books that would supplement this course? Also, why does this course seem so weird. What's with the "communication" assignments. Also, what's the deal with his project "genesis." Really interesting stuff. I hope I get a chance to pick your brain.

Minsky's Society of Mind would be a good launching off point. Other than that particularly famous example, I would just check out any of the authors of the papers in that link.

This class fulfills a communication requirement at MIT, so there are a one-page response/reflections due at each class. These reflections basically just ensure that you have a decent grasp at the main points of the paper, so that you would be ready for a seminar-style discussion in class.

Genesis is pretty interesting. Here's a link to the details: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/genesis/ But in short, it's an attempt to get computers to understand stories — and to discover what is the fundamental difference between the human mind and all other animals (spoiler alert: Winston's group believes it's the ability for humans to take two concepts and merge them into a new concept, indefinitely. AKA: creating "stories"). So the goal of Genesis is story-understanding.

Thanks for the link. I read through the three main papers. Very interesting. The project seems to be dead though. Why hasn't there been any development in the past few years? Did you guys reach a hurdle you couldn't overcome? Or have people's interests shifted? Thanks for taking the time to answer Kenneth.

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