depth first search

Today I looked again at my course registration for the coming semester. I’m entering that frenzied two week period of course shopping, trying to optimize some mysterious complex formula involving workload, schedule, topic, interest, usefulness, redundancy, along with all those vague slanted indicators enumerable only in feelings and not in words. Emoticons of choice.

I had just decided that perhaps a course in object recognition would be more useful than a course in intelligent robotics. But between first weighing the relative merits yesterday and now, registration has closed. I won’t be able to show my 500 line Python script that does Eigenface recognition. Now I’m thinking I should just go straight to signal theory, everything else being a muddled philosophical perversion of Shannon and his compatriots.

How much of machine learning is just clever use of clustering?

The department doesn’t offer a course in signal theory. I’d have to go to engineers to get my fix. Shudder.

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