Artificial Intelligence
Professional · IT · Certificate available
292 lessons 2.5h runtime 11 units 548 links between lessons Test yourself · 11 quizzes, a mid exam, and a final
StudyWalks exists to make learning clear, accessible, and free.
Short lessons. In order. Built for people who want to understand.
Begin with Unit 1: What AI Is. It sets the foundation for everything that follows.
Nothing watched yet
Unit 1: What AI Is 25 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 23:04
- 0001 What Artificial Intelligence Is
- 0002 The Computational Agent
- 0003 The Behavioral Standard
- 0004 The AI Effect
- 0005 Machine Learning Is Part of AI
- 0007 The Turing Test
- 0008 The Test Is Not a Certificate
- 0010 Fluency Without Understanding
- 0011 "It Talks Like It Understands"
- 0012 The Dartmouth Bet
- 0013 Early Wins in Small Worlds
- 0014 The Overreach Pattern
- 0015 AI Winters
- 0016 The Learning Turn
- 0017 Deep Blue and AlphaGo: Two Paradigms
- 0021 Agent and Environment: One System
- 0022 "AI Agents Are Robots"
- 0023 Stimuli: What Comes In
- 0024 The Belief State
- 0025 Observability
- 0026 The Chess-World Fallacy
- 0027 Deterministic and Stochastic
- 0028 Other Minds
- 0029 The Design Space
- 0030 Bounded Rationality
Unit 2: Counting and Search 36 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 36:46
- 0061 The Graph
- 0062 The Path
- 0063 The Tree
- 0064 The Branching Factor
- 0065 Depth
- 0066 Possibilities Multiply
- 0067 No Agent Examines Everything
- 0068 Pricing a Tree by Hand worked example
- 0076 The Search Problem
- 0077 The Frontier
- 0078 The Search Loop
- 0079 The Selection Slot
- 0080 Breadth-First Search
- 0081 Breadth-First, Run Whole worked example
- 0082 "The Machine Understood the Map"
- 0083 The Fewest-Steps Guarantee
- 0084 The Memory Bill
- 0085 Depth-First Search
- 0086 Depth-First, Run Whole worked example
- 0087 Thrift Without Promises
- 0088 Strategies Are Purchases
- 0089 Remembering Where You Have Been
- 0090 "A Bigger Computer Would Fix It"
- 0091 What Blind Search Buys
- 0101 Path Cost
- 0102 The Heuristic
- 0103 Admissible
- 0104 Greedy Search
- 0105 The Gorge Trap worked example
- 0106 A-star
- 0107 A-star Beats the Gorge worked example
- 0108 The Eight-Kilometer Delivery review
- 0109 The Optimism Guarantee
- 0110 "A Helpful Estimate Must Be Accurate"
- 0111 Relax the Problem
- 0112 What Guessing Well Buys
Unit 3: Games 20 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 23:05
- 0141 Games as Striped Trees
- 0142 MAX and MIN
- 0143 The Three Fences
- 0144 Score the Tree Backward
- 0145 Pebbles, Solved Whole worked example
- 0146 The Poisoned Position
- 0147 The Seven-Pebble Strategy review
- 0148 The Minimax Value
- 0149 "Perfect Play Means Winning"
- 0150 The Stall Duel, Scored worked example
- 0151 The Best-Leaf Trap
- 0152 Alpha-Beta
- 0153 Alpha-Beta at the Stalls worked example
- 0154 Pruning Is Not Approximation
- 0155 The Real-Board Wall
- 0156 The Evaluation Function
- 0157 Deep Blue: Judgment Written
- 0158 AlphaGo: Judgment Grown
- 0159 "It Considered Every Possibility"
- 0160 Lifting the Fences
Unit 4: Constraints 16 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 21:03
- 0181 The Constraint Problem
- 0182 A Solution Is a State of Affairs
- 0183 Hard Constraints Only, For Now
- 0184 The Festival, Modeled worked example
- 0185 Backtracking Search
- 0186 The Early Check
- 0187 Backtracking at the Festival worked example
- 0188 Propagation
- 0189 Elimination Is Safe
- 0190 Propagation at the Festival worked example
- 0191 "It Tries Every Grid"
- 0192 Split and Propagate
- 0193 Finishing the Festival review
- 0194 Constraints Are Information
- 0195 "More Rules Make It Harder"
- 0196 The Modeling Price
Unit 5: Rules and Notation 27 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 29:31
- 0221 The Proposition
- 0222 "The Computer Knows What the Words Mean"
- 0223 The Rule
- 0224 The Knowledge Base
- 0225 The Plant Clinic worked example
- 0226 Bottom-Up: Derive Everything
- 0227 The Fixed Point
- 0228 Bottom-Up at the Clinic worked example
- 0229 Top-Down: Start from the Question
- 0230 Top-Down at the Clinic worked example
- 0231 The Proof Is the Audit Trail
- 0232 Sound and Complete
- 0233 The Fence
- 0234 Silence at the Edge
- 0235 Blind to Near-Synonyms
- 0236 Sound Reasoning, Wrong Knowledge
- 0237 The Knowledge Bottleneck
- 0238 "More Rules Make the System Smarter"
- 0239 All-or-Nothing
- 0240 The Succulent Audit review
- 0245 Notation Is Compressed Language
- 0246 Letters Are Local Names
- 0247 The Machine with a Slot
- 0248 And, and If
- 0249 The One-Way Arrow
- 0250 Raised and Lowered Labels
- 0251 Reading Outside-In worked example
Unit 6: Chance and Belief 21 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 25:40
- 0281 A Chance Is a Share of Cases
- 0282 The Books Balance
- 0283 Along a Branch, Multiply
- 0284 The Independence Flag
- 0285 Across Branches, Add
- 0286 The Leaf Audit worked example
- 0287 Shrinking the World
- 0288 The Weighted Average
- 0295 Probability Is Degree of Belief
- 0296 The 1,000-Worlds Method
- 0297 Compound Beliefs by Counting worked example
- 0298 Evidence Shrinks the World
- 0299 The Screening Count review
- 0300 Base-Rate Neglect
- 0301 Bayes' Rule
- 0302 Same Answer, Two Roads worked example
- 0303 The Licensed Crossing
- 0304 The Transposed Conditional
- 0305 Rules That Hedge
- 0306 Always a Posterior
- 0307 Numbers from Somewhere
Unit 7: Decisions 15 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 20:12
- 0351 Best Guess Is Not Best Act
- 0352 "Act on the Likeliest Outcome"
- 0353 Utility
- 0354 The Decision Variable
- 0355 Expected Utility
- 0356 The Umbrella Table worked example
- 0357 Stakes Move Thresholds
- 0358 Utility Is Not Money
- 0359 Insurance, Rationally
- 0360 "Playing the Averages Ignores Risk"
- 0361 The Value of Information
- 0362 Pricing the Forecast worked example
- 0363 The Policy
- 0364 The Potter's Permit review
- 0365 What the Calculus Does Not Choose
Unit 8: Learning 38 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 0401 Learning from Examples
- 0402 The Stall Dataset
- 0403 The Test Drawer
- 0404 Nearest Neighbor
- 0405 The Tie in the Ruler
- 0406 The Decision Tree
- 0407 Growing the Stall Tree worked example
- 0408 Grading Day
- 0409 Opening the Drawer worked example
- 0410 "It Scored Well, So It Understands"
- 0411 Overfitting
- 0412 The Remedy Trio
- 0413 The Pile Is the Bottleneck
- 0414 "More Data Always Helps"
- 0421 The Row
- 0422 The Weighted Sum
- 0423 The Threshold and the Balance
- 0424 The Boundary
- 0431 The Perceptron
- 0432 "Neural Networks Work Like the Brain"
- 0433 The Nudging Rule
- 0434 The Training Run review
- 0435 Reading the Knobs
- 0436 Convergence, If Separable
- 0437 The Either-Or Wall worked example
- 0438 "A Learning Machine Gets There Eventually"
- 0439 Stack the Cuts
- 0440 Bends Required
- 0451 Depth Is Composition
- 0452 Gentle Bends
- 0453 The Error Landscape
- 0454 Downhill by Feel worked example
- 0455 The Learning Rate
- 0456 "Training Finds the Best Possible"
- 0457 Backward Blame
- 0458 Scale: The Three Dials
- 0459 "Bigger Is Always Better"
- 0460 The Last Readable Knobs
Unit 9: Language, Vision, Bodies 42 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 0501 The Next-Word Task
- 0502 Text Labels Itself
- 0503 The Bigram Table worked example
- 0504 The Counting Wall
- 0505 The Missing Ruler
- 0506 Known by Its Company
- 0507 Words as Rows worked example
- 0508 Learning the Rows
- 0509 The Rows Carry Fingerprints
- 0510 One Row per Word
- 0511 Attention worked example
- 0512 The Transformer
- 0513 Pretraining
- 0514 Statistical Residue
- 0515 "It Looks the Answers Up in a Database"
- 0516 Becoming an Assistant
- 0517 Context Is Not Training
- 0518 "It Learns from Talking to Me"
- 0519 Confabulation
- 0520 Fluency, Decoupled Again
- 0521 The Open Question
- 0522 The Invented Citation review
- 0531 A Grid of Numbers
- 0532 "The Computer Sees the Picture"
- 0533 Why One Cut Fails
- 0534 The Sliding Template worked example
- 0535 The Edge Map
- 0536 Templates Are Learned
- 0537 Weight Sharing
- 0538 The Seeing Stack
- 0539 Seeing Is Not Exempt
- 0546 The Unpackaged World
- 0547 Layers of Control
- 0548 Remember, Command, Tell
- 0549 The Floor Cleaner, Layered worked example
- 0550 Every Hard Cell at Once
- 0551 Experience Is Expensive
- 0552 Borrowed Experience
- 0553 The Inverted Ladder
- 0554 A Demo Is a Chosen World
- 0555 "The Demo Robot Is the Product Robot"
- 0556 Stakes with Contact
Unit 10: Limits and Society 38 lessons, 2 lecture parts
- 0561 A Capability Claim Is Three Claims
- 0562 The Bar-Exam Claim, Expanded worked example
- 0563 The Benchmark
- 0564 Contamination
- 0565 The Frozen Exam
- 0566 Communal Overfitting
- 0567 The Benchmark Life Cycle
- 0568 "Benchmark Score Equals Capability"
- 0569 Every Learner Is a Bet
- 0570 No Refuge in Simplicity
- 0571 The Jagged Frontier
- 0572 The Walls, Dated
- 0573 Multiply Along the Chain
- 0574 The Hundred-Step Task worked example
- 0575 The Auditor's Checklist review
- 0576 The Symmetry Rule
- 0577 Forecasts Are Extrapolations
- 0578 Conditioned Watching
- 0579 "The Curve Tells You Where It's Going"
- 0591 The Ledger, Presented
- 0592 Fingerprints Become Verdicts
- 0593 "The Algorithm Is Objective — It's Math"
- 0594 Three Kinds of Bias
- 0595 The Feedback Loop
- 0596 Fairness Is a Decision
- 0597 Owed a Reason
- 0598 Standard and Deep Opacity
- 0599 The Behavioral Audit
- 0600 Auditable by Design
- 0601 The Responsibility Gap
- 0602 "The Machine Did It, So No One Is Responsible"
- 0603 Human in the Loop
- 0604 The Gap Is Chosen
- 0605 Written vs. Meant
- 0606 The Engagement Machine worked example
- 0607 Preference Tuning Relocates the Question
- 0608 Govern, Map, Measure, Manage
- 0609 The Citizen's Part
Unit 11: Capstones 14 lessons, 1 lecture part
Lecture: Watch · 18:24
- 0621 The Held Map
- 0622 The Corner Cell
- 0623 Three Systems, Placed worked example
- 0624 The Omissions Ledger
- 0625 The Mathematics Invoice
- 0626 "The Real Field Is for Other People"
- 0627 The Reading Path Is Free
- 0628 The Habits Transfer
- 0629 The Standing Open Problems
- 0630 The Kit Outlives the Snapshot
- 0631 The Bet, Revisited
- 0632 The Word Carries Too Much
- 0633 The Final Audit review
- 0634 The Participant
Who this subject is for
- IT and business professionals
- Managers deciding how to use AI
- Students heading into computing
- Anyone who wants to understand what AI systems do and do not do
Why Artificial Intelligence matters
AI tools are now part of how a lot of work gets done, and using them well starts with knowing how they work. It is the foundation for:
- Machine learning
- Data science
- AI ethics and policy
- Working with AI tools
Time to complete
- of lessons (292, measured)
- 2.5 h
- of lectures (14)
- 5.5 h
- learning hours on the certificate, with quizzes and the final
- 12 h
Times are measured from the recordings and the exam time limits. Go at your own pace; nothing expires.
Featured pathway · $35
AI Foundations Pathway
Five micro-certificates (AI Literacy, Data Literacy, Critical Thinking, Cybersecurity Essentials and STEM Foundations) plus the Full Certificate in Computer Science. Hold all six and claim the pathway certificate, the badge and a verification number.
Explore the AI Foundations Pathway →Sources for Artificial Intelligence — the textbook it was written against, and the second source it was checked against.
This is free, and stays free. If it helped, here is what keeps it running.