- All lectures were pre-recorded, which I thought was super convenient, since I could watch them at 1.25x speed.
- I thought the lectures were generally very clear. Some of the content was not new, however. We went over some search algorithms from CS 32/180, and there was probability that was taught in Stats 100A (or equivalent).
- We had 5 homework assignments, which were all very reasonable. One of them was considerably harder than the others and took a lot more time.
- Overall, I thought the course was enjoyable. I didn't need to dedicate too much time to do well in the course. The midterm exams weren't super easy but they were doable. Going over the discussion section slides and the lecture examples was helpful. (I didn't read the textbook, so I can't comment on how helpful it is.)

During the Covid Era, This professor decided to prerecord his lectures weekly and post them at the scheduled lecture time, then have a weekly office hours of sorts, where you can go and ask questions after lecture. It definitely worked well for a while, but I found that the q/a sessions would be less and less helpful as time went on. The LISP projects are seemingly required by the department for the class, and just feel outdated and untouched. However, they will give you great functional programming practice that will help you in cs131. Tests are very concept based, and the homework projects/lecture videos will not help you, you will need to read the book for the details needed to answer the test questions. He is a good professor but I cant help but feel like we wasted a lot of time in the class focusing on logic as taught in Phil 31, and search algorithms as taught in cs180.

Terrible class. Do not take with this professor. Curve is ridiculous. Final is the stupidest CS test I've taken at this school. Material is severely outdated.

Course SHOULD have started with A* search, skipped the logic sections, and focused more heavily on machine learning, NLP, and CV. Everything else is covered in other CS classes at this school (CS180 covers all the search algorithms, CS131 covers Prolog and logic programming, and CS181 rounds out everything else).

Truly a waste of time and effort.

I honestly dont get the negative reviews. He was definitely a solid professor, kind of reminded me of Smallberg in the way he lectured, since he explained all the concepts clearly. I know some people might find the lectures “dry” or “boring”, but i personally looked forward to attending every lecture, as the concepts were interesting and i know i would leave learning something new and not get lost.
The midterm and final were fine as long as you understood the lectures. He did post old lecture recordings, and as someone who watched both the in person and recorded lectures, i can say that they cover exactly the same material… however i still recommend going in person as i find it kind of sad how he encourages participation yet no one answers.
The projects/homeworks were pretty fun as well. We had to implement a solver for the homer simpson boat problem. We also had to implement a Sokoban solver, which was graded based on how well you did relatively to the class, but fortunately it wasnt too competitive.
However, the final homework was complete BS. He barely went over any of the concepts near the end, and it shows in the low avg score.
Anyways, if you want a straightforward class, definitely take it with this Guy. He may not be the best professor, but hes far from the worst ;)

Prof. Van den Broeck seems to have improved greatly from previous quarters. I did not see any issue with his lecture style -- his lectures were pretty interesting and I thought he explained the material clearly. The only thing I would say is that he went by a little too fast during live lectures for me to keep up, so I had to supplement with the recordings from F21, which remain an excellent resource for learning the material.

Past reviews say that the homeworks would take only an hour or so if we were allowed to use a modern programming language, but it seems he changed the homeworks significantly once the programming language for the course was switched to python. There were four homeworks in total (there were supposed to be five but we ran out of time in the quarter for the fifth one to be posted), and each took about 3-5 hours. All but one of the homeworks were fairly challenging -- rather than worrying about Lisp as in previous years, students can now grapple with actual artificial intelligence concepts.

The exams too seem to have been improved. As the previous reviews mention, the midterm is fairly straightforward, with around a 75 average. However, there were some pretty serious errors with the grading, but most of them were caught and fixed by the TAs (I did have to go to office hours to see my exam in person to catch all the mistakes though). Fortunately, the final exam, while tough, was nowhere near as difficult as the past reviews make it out to be. One review mentioned that if a student knows everything covered in the lectures from top-to-bottom, they could maybe get a 75% on the exam maximum. However, this year, that seemed to be more like 90%. There were only a few questions that were unreasonable given what was covered in lecture. Speaking of which, the professor strongly recommends the textbook for studying from the exams, but I personally found it more than sufficient to just study the lectures in-depth. That being said, the amount of content we were expected to know was frankly unreasonable considering the closed-notes nature of the exams. I ran some calculations and found that each CS 161 lecture covers 2.5x the material of a typical CS 181 lecture (which was closed-note) and almost as much material as a typical CS 143 lecture (which was open-note). The lectures were so dense that studying each lecture took me 4 hours (meaning that it was essentially a full-time job just to study two lectures per day). However, that mostly applied to the lectures in the first half of the course (before the midterm); I found the ones in the latter half to be far more reasonable in terms of the amount of content covered. Nonetheless, no need to stress if you can't study every single detail, as there is a curve applied at the end of the course. For reference, I received ~93% raw score which was curved up to an A+.

My main gripe with the course is that there were very few resources for students to get help. The professor did not hold regular office hours, which I consider to be the bare minimum. To speak with the professor, you need to schedule an appointment with him. The TAs were also apathetic and unresponsive. Aside from that, however, I found the course to be enjoyable overall, as the workload was significantly lighter compared to other CS classes and the material was absolutely fascinating. Studying the material in this course even helped me significantly in an interview, causing me to get a 190k TC offer! Given the improvements made to this course, I would definitely recommend it.

This class was pretty average. Prof. van den Broeck wasn't an incredible or engaging lecturer, but he explained concepts clearly. He often tried to encourage participation, but it kinda fell flat because everyone would just sit there silently (not really his fault). However, classes got the point across, and he would walk through examples on the whiteboard to clarify points. Sometimes lecture would end 20 minutes early if we finished a concept, which could be nice depending on who you ask.
Homeworks weren't too bad, only 5 Lisp assignments that were mainly just challenging due to Lisp being a functional language. None of them were incredibly hard, and you could get help from TAs if needed.
Exams were fairly challenging. He provides a study guide for both the midterm and final, and the exam does match up with them. The midterm was just a normal CS exam, and the mean was around a 75. The final was harder, consisting of 60 ish True/False and Multiple Choice questions increasing in difficulty, filled out on a scantron. It seemed very daunting, but in 3 hours it was pretty doable to at least put your best guess, and there were only 5 ish questions I really had no idea on. The mean was also around a 75 in the end.
I believe the overall grade was curved a little, seemed like a few percent. Again, not an incredible class but I definitely learned the fundamentals of AI and took away a lot from the class. If you're interested in AI, this is a good introductory course (and overlaps with M146, machine learning, pretty well).

Originally posted a positive official course evaluation, changed my mind after the final.

So many things pointed to it being a practical problem solving exam, including this quote from the study guide: "Questions will test for insight and understanding. I will not ask historical or encyclopedic information", the midterm and last two homeworks (and associated lectures) being practical problems, and the allowance of calculators on the exam.

Guess what the exam was on.

Yes, he's not obliged to make things easy, and all the questions were things that were taught, and it probably wasn't intentionally malicious, but if you take his class beware surprises or trying to guess what might be on the final.

Rant aside, he's an alright lecturer, teaches from the book but keeps things logically connected (in the sense that he teaches the book's topics and examples rather than reading paragraph summaries). If you don't have the book, you can do alright off of his lectures, but his examples might have no lead-up since they're from the book which spends a bit more time laying out the problem.

Homeworks are in lisp, except the last ones which are practical problems. Overall they're pretty great in that they give an intuitive feel for the topics (besides final, see above). Generally, they have good "pacing" in that you can finish one function at a time, and see how they all come together. Minor quibbles with specific homeworks, one had a heuristic competition aspect, where only #1 got 100%, and the slowest got at most 80%, another had no way of telling if you were on the right track since you plugged outputs into a blackbox solver. The problem sets were good questions, but no solutions were posted afterwards, making them a bit useless for studying.

Class materials were not too great, the study guides had some issues besides the above, they were basically the syllabus list with a little more detail. No slides or lecture notes, the study guides mostly just let you google AI topics without getting bogged down in sci-fi or news articles.

One of my favorite professors so far. He had great, engaging lectures if you actually bothered to listen and follow along. He has a very logical, precise way of explaining things, that melded well with me and I learned a lot from lectures. However, one big drawback is that he doesn't provide notes/slides, so if you don't go to lecture you better hope you can understand the textbook yourself (not very hard till the midterm tbh, but gets progressively harder after that).

In terms of tests, his midterm was challenging, but it was very practical, and if you knew your concepts you could do well pretty easily. The final was however, one of the shittiest CS finals I've ever done. More of a test of your English and your memorization ability than actual CS. About 60% of the test came down to if you had seen that word before and could place it in the textbook. Honestly why would anyone every have a multiple choice exam in CS?

Overall, homeworks, lecture and midterm were fine, but that shitty final dropped me from an A+ to a B+, so I'm pretty bummed about that. Given the choice, I'd probably take the class with him again because I enjoyed his lectures.

The class is OK, professor doesn't use any slide but strictly follow the textbook. As stated by other students, the final is ridiculous, multiple choices, most of them are details and concepts, very little of them require mathematics and logic if any.
The material and topics are somehow outdated, (nearly unchanged for 20+ years http://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Fall/1994/FS-94-05/FS94-05-001.pdf). It's probablly not be the AI that you have ever imagined. The first half is on searching, the second half covers logic. Till the very end of the class, Bayesian network and machine learning(only decision tree) are included in only 2 or 3 lectures. In my view, the class material is traditional and a little bit outdated compared to nowadays fancy stuff. But they are still good, at least the logic part is intuitive, some material are indeed fundamental of fancier stuff.
For reference, with near average midterm, full points HWs and 10 points above average final I got A.

This class is pretty easy. Lectures are sometimes confusing as we does not elaborate on important topics and breezes by them without clarification. But there are a lot of resources online (ppts on our textbook for example) to study from, so it is not too hard to study for this class. Tests are fairly easy (final was MC, and ppl just finished in half the time and left). Pretty interesting class that could be taught better.