TITLE: At the End of an Empty Office Hour
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 20, 2005 11:16 AM
DESC: I'm never lonely when my office hours go unused.  I just wonder what students who need the help are doing instead.
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BODY:
A while back on the mailing list for the
textbook
<A HREF="http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/">
   Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach</A>,
co-author
<A HREF="http://www.norvig.com/">
   Peter Norvig</A>
wrote:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
A professor who shall remain anonymous once
thanked me for including him in the bibliography
of AIMA.  I told him that his work was seminal
to the field, so of course I included it.  "Yeah,
yeah, I don't care about that," he said, "what I
care about is that students look in the back of
the book to see if my name is there, and if it
is they think I'm important and they don't bother
me in office hours as much."
</BLOCKQUOTE>

I am not cited in AIMA, but whatever I am
doing to scare them off must be working.

By the way, Norvig also wrote one of my favorite
books on programming,
<A HREF="http://www.norvig.com/paip.html">
   Paradigms of AI Programming</A>.
Nominally, this book teaches AI programming
in Lisp, but really it teaches the reader
how to program, period.  Norvig re-implements
many of the classic AI programs, such as
Eliza, GPS, and Danny Bobrow's Student,
showing design and implementation decisions
along the way.  His use of
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2005-03.html#e2005-03-13T11_35_52.htm">
   case studies</A>
provides a lot of context in which to learn
about building a programming.
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