Wrestling With Python

I have signed up to take an online class (Computer Science 221) from Stanford University that is about Artificial Intelligence - the science of making computer programs that reason about the world around us. It begins next Tuesday and runs until the middle of December; there is a homework assignment to turn in each week, a midterm exam and a final exam.  It is free, so you don't get credit for passing the class, just a certificate signed by the instructors: Sebastian Thrun, a CS professor at Stanford and Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google (and previously the head of the Computation Services division at the NASA Ames Research Center). It is an ambitious undertaking for Stanford: 130,000 people from all over the world have signed up for the class. In the group e-mail I got last week, they are struggling with handling all the language barriers.    

I am struggling with learning to program. It is not a requirement for the class, but it is suggested that being able to write programs for the scenarios given will make the class more valuable. Now programming for me means writing a program in Fortran, punching the correct holes onto note cards, and then leaving them with the CS Department to be run overnight. Each card was one command, like FOR I = 1 TO 20.    

If the 4th card (of 60) was incorrect, the program stopped, gave you an error message, and spit out your cards. You fixed card 4, turned them back in, and waited until the next day again. Computers in 1970 used a lot of juice; there wasn't enough electricity to run them during the day for students. There were no personal computers; just room sized monsters with names like UNIVAC and ENIAC.    

The class I'm taking suggests that I learn to use the Python programming lnguage. After a couple mis-starts on Python tutorials, I've finally found one that lays everything out for me. The program seems easy enough so far, but I'm only on lesson 5 of Learning Python the Hard Way. Along the way, I'm learning how to use a text writer called GedIt and the computer's Terminal program. I'm sure if I get in trouble, Tammy's brother Sean will help me out. This is probably kindergarten level to him.  

The week of December 5, we are studying Robotics and Robot Motion Planning. I'm going to build a robot that will take Whimzy out late at night. That's probably the week that I, Robot will be the movie of the week, with Will Smith battling the killer robots in Chicago in 2035. So far when I leave out the quotation marks, I just get a syntax error. If my robot turns red all of a sudden like they do in the movie, I'm going to hit it with a sledge hammer. Better safe than sorry.