If any course can be interesting and fun, it has to be Intro to AI. One of the reason why AI attracts so many smart and motivated people is that it is just fundamentally cool; it just is. AI of today was sci fi yesterday; sci fi today is AI tomorrow. HAL started out as purely a creature of (cinematic) fiction; today NASA aims at building an ``immobot" (stationary AI that controls a large structure) with many of the same powers and abilities (but hopefully without the same defects). Not long ago some of the smartest humans on the planet said that a computing machine could never play grandmaster chess; today, arguably the best chess-player on Earth is Deep Blue. What Deep Blue has done is something people have dreamed about for centuries, in some cases unsure about whether such an accomplishment was even possible.2 Arguably the Information Age is at bottom simply the ascension of AI, and the systems it produces. AI researchers of today are working toward cars that drive themselves (we'll take some special looks at this goal), reliable household robots, real-time translation telephones. In fact, a recent spate of books (including, e.g., Robot, from Carnegie Mellon's Hans Moravec, a roboticist there) claims that AI isn't that far away from creating robots that are as smart as people. These books are written by mainstream AI engineers, not lunatics. All of this adds up, I think, to interesting stuff.