| Title: | Natural & Artifical Intelligen |
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| Course Section Number: | FRT-101-08 |
| Department: | Freshman Tutorial |
| Description: | If a computer can think, how would we even know? And what does "thinking" mean in the first place? This course begins by stepping back from artificial intelligence to consider intelligence itself. Drawing on ideas from across cultures and disciplines, we'll explore how humans, animals, and machines learn, reason, and make sense of the world. Through a mix of readings, discussions, writing, experiments, and simulations, we'll test different ways of understanding intelligence and see where they succeed or break down. The goal isn't to settle the question, but to sharpen it: to develop a clearer sense of what's really being asked when we call something "intelligent," and why that question is harder than it first appears. Colin McKinney is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Mathematics and Computer Science at Wabash College, and a master's student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. His work ranges from computer hardware and programming languages to artificial intelligence and the history of mathematics and computing, but he's especially interested in how ideas connect across fields and across time. His classes revolve around big questions and trying out different ways of approaching them: sometimes by reading, sometimes by experimenting, and sometimes by arguing about what counts as a good answer. Outside of class, he enjoys learning languages (his French is passable enough to earn compliments from Parisian waiters, and he can curse in Klingon), cooking, traveling, and PC gaming. He lives in Crawfordsville but considers Texas home, which means he has high standards for barbecue and tacos. |
| Credits: | 1.00 |
| Start Date: | August 26, 2026 |
| End Date: | December 19, 2026 |
| Meeting Information: |
08/27/2026-12/17/2026 Lecture Tuesday, Thursday 09:25AM - 10:40AM, Goodrich Hall, Room 006
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| Faculty: | McKinney, Colin |
Course Status
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Enrolled/ Available/ Waitlist |
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