- 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 The LISP projects are seemingly required by the department for the class, and just feel outdated and untouched.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 Material is severely outdated.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.

Professor Van Den Broeck clearly has a good understanding of how to teach the course material. The lectures are well structured and while some sort of annotated slides (or lecture recordings) would have been nice, the textbook and slides combo worked fairly well when I needed to catch up on missed lectures (and previous year recordings are also available I believe). The one weakness of this course I feel is the disconnect between the lecture contents and the homeworks. Professor makes it very clear from the start that he has little to no involvement in the creation and grading of the homework assignments, and that the one TA that is in charge of them should be contacted for all related inquiries.

This is all well and good except for the fact that the TA in charge of grading was seemingly asleep at the wheel the entire quarter. Multiple times on piazza the TA (who I believe does not have any discussion sections and just does the homework?) said that any homework grading related questions should be emailed to them, yet despite attempting to contact them multiple times through multiple channels I was never able to reach them regarding points I missed on the first homework (of which I am still at this point in week 10 trying to contact them over). Moreover, aspects of the homework assignments just seemingly outright contradicted what we were taught in lecture at times? For example, professor made a big deal about how our algorithms should prioritize memory usage over execution time, yet our second homework in large part was graded based on how our algorithms performed (in terms of execution time) relative to the other student's submissions. And no, the grading methodology was never explained to us, before or after that assignment was due.

Still, this class was very interesting, was taught by an engaged professor, and while the grading and philosophy behind the homework assignments was unclear, they were all still enjoyable and generally struck a good balance of difficulty level.

Professor Van Den Broeck clearly has a good understanding of how to teach the course material. The lectures are well structured and while some sort of annotated slides (or lecture recordings) would have been nice, the textbook and slides combo worked fairly well when I needed to catch up on missed lectures (and previous year recordings are also available I believe). The one weakness of this course I feel is the disconnect between the lecture contents and the homeworks. Professor makes it very clear from the start that he has little to no involvement in the creation and grading of the homework assignments, and that the one TA that is in charge of them should be contacted for all related inquiries.

This is all well and good except for the fact that the TA in charge of grading was seemingly asleep at the wheel the entire quarter. Multiple times on piazza the TA (who I believe does not have any discussion sections and just does the homework?) said that any homework grading related questions should be emailed to them, yet despite attempting to contact them multiple times through multiple channels I was never able to reach them regarding points I missed on the first homework (of which I am still at this point in week 10 trying to contact them over). Moreover, aspects of the homework assignments just seemingly outright contradicted what we were taught in lecture at times? For example, professor made a big deal about how our algorithms should prioritize memory usage over execution time, yet our second homework in large part was graded based on how our algorithms performed (in terms of execution time) relative to the other student's submissions. And no, the grading methodology was never explained to us, before or after that assignment was due.

Still, this class was very interesting, was taught by an engaged professor, and while the grading and philosophy behind the homework assignments was unclear, they were all still enjoyable and generally struck a good balance of difficulty level.

I thought this class was solid overall, though a part of this is me finding the subject matter interesting. In terms of lectures, I thought Prof. Van den Broeck was did a good job presenting the material. Me having a nodding-off-during-lectures problem aside (not anything to do with the lectures, Boelter 3400 + 3-5 PM just happens to be a really bad combo for me), I thought the lectures were quite clear overall, and I personally found the examples pretty helpful. The professor also posted slides + past lecture recordings of the entire course; I didn't personally use them too much, but I did find the recordings occasionally useful in review, and the content covered is more-or-less the same as the in-person lectures.

As far as homework goes, the best way to describe it is that there...mostly wasn't any? We had 4 homeworks, but only the last one was much work (IMO), and that wasn't even assigned until week 9. The first 3 homeworks involved implementing algorithms in Python, but the assignments were scaffolded pretty extensively and didn't take me more than 2 hours each to do. (That's probably somewhat on the lower end time-wise, but we were given 2 weeks to do each of them.) There were also some questions on course content, but they were pretty much just asking about things covered in lecture. The fourth homework was quite a bit longer and pretty noticeably tougher, but up to that point, for the entirety of weeks 1-8, I probably spent at most 6 hours *total* on this class beyond attending lectures + studying for the midterm. A minor nitpick, grading was really slow, to the point that we basically had no grades for 2/3 of the course (HW1, due week 3, wasn't graded until week 7); fortunately, it wasn't a big deal since the affected homeworks ended up with pretty high averages, but we were pretty much in the dark before then.

As far as exams go, they were somewhat long, and fairly memorization-heavy (moreso the final). Format-wise, our midterm was mostly free response with a few True/False questions, whereas our final was entirely Scantron multiple choice. Prof. Van den Broeck wrote "study guidelines" that pretty much laid out ~75% of both the midterm and the final, and for both exams I think just remembering things said in lecture would get you another 15%; the last 10%, however, usually required a good understanding of the algorithms + a decent amount of thinking (assuming you weren't just guessing, which you could've - multiple choice is multiple choice). The exam room was probably 3/4 empty by the end of the midterm, and the final was only ~60-something? questions in 3 hours, so time wasn't a major issue. The averages weren't exactly high, mid 70s for both; that being said, I think there was a fairly generous curve. I had a ~94% raw score and got an A+.

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).

This was overall a very average class and average professor.
Professor Broeck, in my opinion, is not the most engaging speaker and doesn't seem all that motivated either. There were multiple instances where he would end class 30-60 minutes early, leaving me and my fellow peers more confused rather than happy. However, he uploaded all of the recordings of his past online lectures which were actually very good and informative. Once I stopped showing up to lecture and strictly watched his recordings, the class started to get a lot more interesting. I guess he's just not the best live speaker, which isn't his fault. He also likes to write on the chalkboard and it's near impossible to read what he writes if you're not sitting in the first 3 rows. So unless you insist on going to in person lectures, I would suggest just watching the recordings, as they're actually pretty good and teaches the material a lot better than live lecture.

The projects are written in Lisp, which as anyone can tell, is a severely outdated language and is frankly a bit pointless to learn. The projects themselves, save one, are pretty easy overall and if we were able to write in a more modern language, they would probably take less than an hour to do. I found myself spending more time trying to figure out the syntax of Lisp than the actual logic itself. Overall, I treated the assignments as more of a functional programming/basic algorithms practice as opposed to new learning, as it just feels like review of CS32 and CS180.

The tests are a whole different beast. The midterm was doable. It felt like a normal CS exam with short answers, input/output problems, coding problems, multiple choice, etc. If you watch the lectures and study the algorithms up to that point, you should do fine on it.
The final however lived up to its reputation. 60ish questions of just pure nonsense. 45 of the questions were True and False, with every 15 questions or so increasing in weight. (ie the first 15 questions are 1 point each, the next 15 are 2 points each, etc). The remaining questions were all multiple choice. I would estimate that if you knew from top to bottom, everything on the lectures and projects, you could probably get around 75% of the final exam. The rest, you kind of have to be lucky and had seen that word or phrase before, or be a good guesser.

Overall, I actually enjoyed the class. Just treat it as a functional programming/algorithms review and enjoy one of the lighter CS classes at UCLA. Don't expect to learn too much new content, as most of the stuff in this class is severely outdated.