Terrible professor. If he put in as much time creating his homework assignments as we spent trying to understand them, he'd be great. However, he doesn't.

His specs are ambiguous, incomplete, and incredibly time-consuming to implement. On top of that, they teach almost no actual AI. They're just "fill in these functions" with only a tepid explanation of their greater implications. He tells us to write our code functionally, but then makes us write helper functions that require us to use global variables. On the second homework assignment, you can tell he just gave up writing the spec halfway through, because none of the problems after problem 11 even explained what the functions we were implementing were supposed to output, many were duplicates of one another, and some of the specifications were downright contradictory.

I've learned nothing new in this class, yet I've wasted hours and hours of my time on homework assignments that have been naught but incredibly frustrating busy-work. If I could go back in time, I would not take this course with Dyer, because he doesn't seem to put any thought into his homework assignments.

Also I'd kill Hitler.

Dyer is definitely one of the more amusing lecturers. His stories and examples to highlight the material are entertaining and memorable. His enthusiasm for the subject comes across. Unfortunately, the lectures can be hard to follow at times, and his undecipherable scribbles on the board are analgous to his lost students.

Organization could definitely be a little better. It seems like he tries to cover too much in too little time (like he's excited to impart as much AI knowledge on you as possible in 10 weeks). The discussion sections are like a completely different class, which mainly deals with the homeworks unrelated to lecture material (though he does warn you about that from the start.)

The midterm was a punch in the face. They are curved, so don't worry too much about your grade. I think an A was 59%. The tests are based on lecture material and since there is no homework based on the lectures, most people get caught off guard, hard. I'd recommend plugging through some problems in the book, especially the numeric ones like the ones he presents in class. After taking the midterm, you have a good idea of what to expect for the final.

He rewards effort, so if you do your best, you should come out ok. I learned a lot in the class, but could've definitely benefited from more cohesiveness.

Overall, Dyer is fairly difficult, but he curves generously at the end. Homework is worth 50% of the grade, and there's a steep late policy - 20% off per day it's turned late. Start early on the LISP assignments, as you get usually only 2 weeks per assignment.

Teaching-wise, Dyer is decent at explaining examples, but his handwriting is terrible and his notes are terribly unorganized and hard to follow. Discussion is like a completely a different class, but with a good TA, the much clearer examples of algorithms and the help with the HWs were very useful.

The secret to success in his class is to read the textbook and to understand ALL the examples. If you can do the examples on your own, then you'll be fine for the exams. He lectures pretty much directly from the book so going to class is optional...but attendance does give you a boost (can bring you up from a minus). The only other reason to go to class is to see what examples he covers from the book - those he brings up are pretty much guaranteed to appear again on either the midterm or the final. He wasn't very helpful when I went to talk to him (he struck me as one of those professors who is too lazy to care about teaching) so I would recommend asking the TA questions instead.

The midterm average for W09 was a low 40%. The tests are VERY long, and almost no one finishes early. Dyer gives NO partial credit (NONE WHATSOEVER) on exam problems so a key test strategy is to focus on getting the problems that are worth more completely correct, as opposed to trying to get more problems done, as some problems are worth ~10% of the exam and some are worth much less.

Had Dyer for a 8 AM class... that's right, a freakin' 2-hour lecture on AI at EIGHT IN THE MORNING. That does not help in staying up during is lectures, which are usually pretty disorienting and hard to follow as he likes to go off on little tangents and mostly irrelevant anecdotes fairly often. Projects are time-consuming but not impossible, provided you have a good TA (which I was fortunate to have). However, they're basically LISP exercises almost completely irrelevant to the material he actually goes over. The biggest minus in his class is his extremely long exams that no one can finish... while the final is not cumulative, both his midterm and final are super long, closed book and closed NOTES. This doesn't work well too well when coupled with the fact that he tries to pretty much go over the entire textbook in one quarter. Each exam roughly covers at least 10 chapters' worth of material, and unless you go to all of his 8 AM lectures and stay up through them and/or read the entire textbook yourself, well... good luck with that.