Artificial Intelligence (6.034)

MIT 6.034 with Patrick Winston is one of the most beloved AI courses in existence — Winston was the director of MIT's AI Lab for many years and taught this course until his death in 2019, leaving behind lectures that are simultaneously rigorous and genuinely funny. The course covers AI's classical foundations: search algorithms (A*, minimax), constraint satisfaction, rule-based systems, machine learning fundamentals, genetic algorithms, neural networks, and language.

Unlike modern ML-focused AI courses that start from deep learning, 6.034 teaches the full breadth of AI methods — including the symbolic and logical approaches that pre-dated neural networks and remain relevant for understanding the field's history and certain problem domains. It's the academic complement to applied ML courses, providing the intellectual context for why modern AI developed the way it did.