Course Six · The Complete Micro-Course

Artificial intelligence,
one idea at a time.

The whole introductory AI canon, rebuilt as 292 numbered videos — each one a single idea, built in the order the ideas actually depend on each other. No hype, no hand-waving: search before learning, probability before decisions, and every claim traced to the text it came from.

292 lessons · 249 atoms · 33 procedures · 10 capstones57 of 292 live

How the course works

Every idea has a number. Every number knows what comes before it.

Almost everything written about AI starts in the middle — at the model that shipped last month — and leaves the machinery underneath unexplained. This course starts at zero and builds in dependency order. An agent that senses and acts comes before search; search comes before games; probability comes before decisions; all of it comes before learning. By the time a language model appears, every part of it has already been built and numbered.

Three kinds of video: atoms (one definition, mechanism, or distinction, about twenty seconds), procedures (one method, shown step by step — running a search, propagating a constraint, updating on evidence), and capstones (several ideas run together on one real system). Where the field genuinely disagrees — on what these systems understand, on what they should be allowed to do — the course lays out the standard positions and declares no verdict.

The whole map

All 292 videos, in order.

New videos post daily until the course is complete. Live ones link straight to the short; the rest are on their way.

Unit 3

Games

0141 Games as Striped Trees Atom Soon
0142 MAX and MIN Atom Soon
0143 The Three Fences Atom Soon
0144 Score the Tree Backward Atom Soon
0145 Pebbles, Solved Whole Procedure Soon
0146 The Poisoned Position Atom Soon
0147 The Seven-Pebble Strategy Capstone Soon
0148 The Minimax Value Atom Soon
0149 "Perfect Play Means Winning" Atom Soon
0150 The Stall Duel, Scored Procedure Soon
0151 The Best-Leaf Trap Atom Soon
0152 Alpha-Beta Atom Soon
0153 Alpha-Beta at the Stalls Procedure Soon
0154 Pruning Is Not Approximation Atom Soon
0155 The Real-Board Wall Atom Soon
0156 The Evaluation Function Atom Soon
0157 Deep Blue: Judgment Written Atom Soon
0158 AlphaGo: Judgment Grown Atom Soon
0159 "It Considered Every Possibility" Atom Soon
0160 Lifting the Fences Atom Soon
Unit 4

Constraints

0181 The Constraint Problem Atom Soon
0182 A Solution Is a State of Affairs Atom Soon
0183 Hard Constraints Only, For Now Atom Soon
0184 The Festival, Modeled Procedure Soon
0185 Backtracking Search Atom Soon
0186 The Early Check Atom Soon
0187 Backtracking at the Festival Procedure Soon
0188 Propagation Atom Soon
0189 Elimination Is Safe Atom Soon
0190 Propagation at the Festival Procedure Soon
0191 "It Tries Every Grid" Atom Soon
0192 Split and Propagate Atom Soon
0193 Finishing the Festival Capstone Soon
0194 Constraints Are Information Atom Soon
0195 "More Rules Make It Harder" Atom Soon
0196 The Modeling Price Atom Soon
Unit 5

Rules and Notation

0221 The Proposition Atom Soon
0222 "The Computer Knows What the Words Mean" Atom Soon
0223 The Rule Atom Soon
0224 The Knowledge Base Atom Soon
0225 The Plant Clinic Procedure Soon
0226 Bottom-Up: Derive Everything Atom Soon
0227 The Fixed Point Atom Soon
0228 Bottom-Up at the Clinic Procedure Soon
0229 Top-Down: Start from the Question Atom Soon
0230 Top-Down at the Clinic Procedure Soon
0231 The Proof Is the Audit Trail Atom Soon
0232 Sound and Complete Atom Soon
0233 The Fence Atom Soon
0234 Silence at the Edge Atom Soon
0235 Blind to Near-Synonyms Atom Soon
0236 Sound Reasoning, Wrong Knowledge Atom Soon
0237 The Knowledge Bottleneck Atom Soon
0238 "More Rules Make the System Smarter" Atom Soon
0239 All-or-Nothing Atom Soon
0240 The Succulent Audit Capstone Soon
0245 Notation Is Compressed Language Atom Soon
0246 Letters Are Local Names Atom Soon
0247 The Machine with a Slot Atom Soon
0248 And, and If Atom Soon
0249 The One-Way Arrow Atom Soon
0250 Raised and Lowered Labels Atom Soon
0251 Reading Outside-In Procedure Soon
Unit 6

Chance and Belief

0281 A Chance Is a Share of Cases Atom Soon
0282 The Books Balance Atom Soon
0283 Along a Branch, Multiply Atom Soon
0284 The Independence Flag Atom Soon
0285 Across Branches, Add Atom Soon
0286 The Leaf Audit Procedure Soon
0287 Shrinking the World Atom Soon
0288 The Weighted Average Atom Soon
0295 Probability Is Degree of Belief Atom Soon
0296 The 1,000-Worlds Method Atom Soon
0297 Compound Beliefs by Counting Procedure Soon
0298 Evidence Shrinks the World Atom Soon
0299 The Screening Count Capstone Soon
0300 Base-Rate Neglect Atom Soon
0301 Bayes' Rule Atom Soon
0302 Same Answer, Two Roads Procedure Soon
0303 The Licensed Crossing Atom Soon
0304 The Transposed Conditional Atom Soon
0305 Rules That Hedge Atom Soon
0306 Always a Posterior Atom Soon
0307 Numbers from Somewhere Atom Soon
Unit 7

Decisions

0351 Best Guess Is Not Best Act Atom Soon
0352 "Act on the Likeliest Outcome" Atom Soon
0353 Utility Atom Soon
0354 The Decision Variable Atom Soon
0355 Expected Utility Atom Soon
0356 The Umbrella Table Procedure Soon
0357 Stakes Move Thresholds Atom Soon
0358 Utility Is Not Money Atom Soon
0359 Insurance, Rationally Atom Soon
0360 "Playing the Averages Ignores Risk" Atom Soon
0361 The Value of Information Atom Soon
0362 Pricing the Forecast Procedure Soon
0363 The Policy Atom Soon
0364 The Potter's Permit Capstone Soon
0365 What the Calculus Does Not Choose Atom Soon
Unit 8

Learning

0401 Learning from Examples Atom Soon
0402 The Stall Dataset Atom Soon
0403 The Test Drawer Atom Soon
0404 Nearest Neighbor Atom Soon
0405 The Tie in the Ruler Atom Soon
0406 The Decision Tree Atom Soon
0407 Growing the Stall Tree Procedure Soon
0408 Grading Day Atom Soon
0409 Opening the Drawer Procedure Soon
0410 "It Scored Well, So It Understands" Atom Soon
0411 Overfitting Atom Soon
0412 The Remedy Trio Atom Soon
0413 The Pile Is the Bottleneck Atom Soon
0414 "More Data Always Helps" Atom Soon
0421 The Row Atom Soon
0422 The Weighted Sum Atom Soon
0423 The Threshold and the Balance Atom Soon
0424 The Boundary Atom Soon
0431 The Perceptron Atom Soon
0432 "Neural Networks Work Like the Brain" Atom Soon
0433 The Nudging Rule Atom Soon
0434 The Training Run Capstone Soon
0435 Reading the Knobs Atom Soon
0436 Convergence, If Separable Atom Soon
0437 The Either-Or Wall Procedure Soon
0438 "A Learning Machine Gets There Eventually" Atom Soon
0439 Stack the Cuts Atom Soon
0440 Bends Required Atom Soon
0451 Depth Is Composition Atom Soon
0452 Gentle Bends Atom Soon
0453 The Error Landscape Atom Soon
0454 Downhill by Feel Procedure Soon
0455 The Learning Rate Atom Soon
0456 "Training Finds the Best Possible" Atom Soon
0457 Backward Blame Atom Soon
0458 Scale: The Three Dials Atom Soon
0459 "Bigger Is Always Better" Atom Soon
0460 The Last Readable Knobs Atom Soon
Unit 9

Language, Vision, Bodies

0501 The Next-Word Task Atom Soon
0502 Text Labels Itself Atom Soon
0503 The Bigram Table Procedure Soon
0504 The Counting Wall Atom Soon
0505 The Missing Ruler Atom Soon
0506 Known by Its Company Atom Soon
0507 Words as Rows Procedure Soon
0508 Learning the Rows Atom Soon
0509 The Rows Carry Fingerprints Atom Soon
0510 One Row per Word Atom Soon
0511 Attention Procedure Soon
0512 The Transformer Atom Soon
0513 Pretraining Atom Soon
0514 Statistical Residue Atom Soon
0515 "It Looks the Answers Up in a Database" Atom Soon
0516 Becoming an Assistant Atom Soon
0517 Context Is Not Training Atom Soon
0518 "It Learns from Talking to Me" Atom Soon
0519 Confabulation Atom Soon
0520 Fluency, Decoupled Again Atom Soon
0521 The Open Question Atom Soon
0522 The Invented Citation Capstone Soon
0531 A Grid of Numbers Atom Soon
0532 "The Computer Sees the Picture" Atom Soon
0533 Why One Cut Fails Atom Soon
0534 The Sliding Template Procedure Soon
0535 The Edge Map Atom Soon
0536 Templates Are Learned Atom Soon
0537 Weight Sharing Atom Soon
0538 The Seeing Stack Atom Soon
0539 Seeing Is Not Exempt Atom Soon
0546 The Unpackaged World Atom Soon
0547 Layers of Control Atom Soon
0548 Remember, Command, Tell Atom Soon
0549 The Floor Cleaner, Layered Procedure Soon
0550 Every Hard Cell at Once Atom Soon
0551 Experience Is Expensive Atom Soon
0552 Borrowed Experience Atom Soon
0553 The Inverted Ladder Atom Soon
0554 A Demo Is a Chosen World Atom Soon
0555 "The Demo Robot Is the Product Robot" Atom Soon
0556 Stakes with Contact Atom Soon
Unit 10

Limits and Society

0561 A Capability Claim Is Three Claims Atom Soon
0562 The Bar-Exam Claim, Expanded Procedure Soon
0563 The Benchmark Atom Soon
0564 Contamination Atom Soon
0565 The Frozen Exam Atom Soon
0566 Communal Overfitting Atom Soon
0567 The Benchmark Life Cycle Atom Soon
0568 "Benchmark Score Equals Capability" Atom Soon
0569 Every Learner Is a Bet Atom Soon
0570 No Refuge in Simplicity Atom Soon
0571 The Jagged Frontier Atom Soon
0572 The Walls, Dated Atom Soon
0573 Multiply Along the Chain Atom Soon
0574 The Hundred-Step Task Procedure Soon
0575 The Auditor's Checklist Capstone Soon
0576 The Symmetry Rule Atom Soon
0577 Forecasts Are Extrapolations Atom Soon
0578 Conditioned Watching Atom Soon
0579 "The Curve Tells You Where It's Going" Atom Soon
0591 The Ledger, Presented Atom Soon
0592 Fingerprints Become Verdicts Atom Soon
0593 "The Algorithm Is Objective — It's Math" Atom Soon
0594 Three Kinds of Bias Atom Soon
0595 The Feedback Loop Atom Soon
0596 Fairness Is a Decision Atom Soon
0597 Owed a Reason Atom Soon
0598 Standard and Deep Opacity Atom Soon
0599 The Behavioral Audit Atom Soon
0600 Auditable by Design Atom Soon
0601 The Responsibility Gap Atom Soon
0602 "The Machine Did It, So No One Is Responsible" Atom Soon
0603 Human in the Loop Atom Soon
0604 The Gap Is Chosen Atom Soon
0605 Written vs. Meant Atom Soon
0606 The Engagement Machine Procedure Soon
0607 Preference Tuning Relocates the Question Atom Soon
0608 Govern, Map, Measure, Manage Atom Soon
0609 The Citizen's Part Atom Soon
Unit 11

Capstones

0621 The Held Map Atom Soon
0622 The Corner Cell Atom Soon
0623 Three Systems, Placed Procedure Soon
0624 The Omissions Ledger Atom Soon
0625 The Mathematics Invoice Atom Soon
0626 "The Real Field Is for Other People" Atom Soon
0627 The Reading Path Is Free Atom Soon
0628 The Habits Transfer Atom Soon
0629 The Standing Open Problems Atom Soon
0630 The Kit Outlives the Snapshot Atom Soon
0631 The Bet, Revisited Atom Soon
0632 The Word Carries Too Much Atom Soon
0633 The Final Audit Capstone Soon
0634 The Participant Atom Soon

The receipts

Check my work.

Behind the course sits a reference document in which every definition, mechanism, and claim is traced to its source, with a published verification chain recording where each one was checked. Fourteen of the entries exist only to name a common misconception and sit beside the correct idea, linked in both directions — because in this subject the confident wrong answer is everywhere, and naming it is half the lesson.

This is the first course here outside my own teaching fields — philosophy, logic, and ethics — so the sourcing carries more of the weight than the résumé does. That is the point of publishing it. Spot an error? Tell me the video number and the claim — corrections get made in the open.

Follow along

New videos daily.

The course releases in order on YouTube — one idea at a time until all 292 are live. Subscribe to catch each one, or leave your email for an occasional note when a course finishes.