Artificial intelligence course, free from Stanford Engineering

There was a New York Times Science article yesterday on an offering from Stanford Engineering. In the spirit of the Khan Academy, which I greatly admire, an artificial intelligence course is being offered free and online, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. There are currently about 63,000 registrants.

The main course information is here:
http://www.ai-class.com/

According to the syllabus, the course covers "basic elements of AI, such as knowledge representation, inference, machine learning, planning and game playing, information retrieval, and computer vision and robotics," and demands only solid linear algebra skills as a background.  Interestingly, the grading for the online offering is the same as the normal class for registered Stanford students.

Interestingly, Stanford makes available two additional free online classes in databases and machine learning. Looks great, and like a win for open source analytics.