07Hamming1995April11.ArtificialIntelligenceII

"The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn" was the capstone course by Dr. Richard W. Hamming (1915-1998) for graduate students at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey California. This course is intended to instill a "style of thinking" that will enhance one's ability to function as a problem solver of complex technical issues. With respect, students sometimes called the course "Hamming on Hamming" because he relates many research collaborations, discoveries, inventions and achievements of his own. This collection of stories and carefully distilled insights relates how those discoveries came about. Most importantly, these presentations provide objective analysis about the thought processes and reasoning that took place as Dr. Hamming, his associates and other major thinkers, in computer science and electronics, progressed through the grand challenges of science and engineering in the twentieth century.In these Lectures we are more concerned with the aid that computers can give us in the intellectual areas than in the more mechanical areas, for example, manufacturing. In the mechanical area computers have enabled us to make better, preferable, and cheaper products, and in some areas they have been essential, such as space flights to the moon which could hardly be done without the aid of computers. AI can be viewed as complementary to robotics - it is mainly concerned with the intellectual side of the human rather than the physical side, though obviously both are closely concerned in most projects