"We propose that a 2-month study
by 10 men can solve AI."
— Dartmouth Conference Proposal, 1956
Were they right?
CSE 5 – Discussion Session
Event 1 of 5 — Which Big Idea?
CSE 5 – Discussion Session
1997
Deep Blue beats the world chess champion
Big Idea: Representation & Reasoning
IBM's Deep Blue evaluated 200 million positions per second using hand-crafted rules — and won. But it could only play chess. Ask it to play checkers and it was useless.
💬 Why can Deep Blue beat a world champion at chess, but still not "think"?
Event 2 of 5 — Which Big Idea?
CSE 5 – Discussion Session
2012
AlexNet cuts ImageNet error rate in half
Big Idea: Learning + Perception
Error rate dropped from 26% → 15% in a single year. The secret wasn't a smarter algorithm — it was GPUs and 1.2 million labeled images. Data + compute = breakthrough.
💬 What changed in 2012? Was it the algorithm, or something else?
Event 3 of 5 — Which Big Idea?
CSE 5 – Discussion Session
2016
AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol
Big Idea: Learning
Unlike Deep Blue, AlphaGo was given no rules. It learned by playing millions of games against itself. Lee Sedol, one of the world's best players, lost 4–1.
💬 If AlphaGo learned from scratch with no human rules, what does "learning" really mean here?
Event 4 of 5 — Which Big Idea?
CSE 5 – Discussion Session
2018
Amazon's AI misidentifies 28 members of Congress as criminals
Big Idea: Societal Impact
Amazon's face recognition tool incorrectly matched Congress members to criminal mugshots. The training data carried human bias into the system.
💬 This system was trained on real data. So who's responsible when it gets it wrong?
Event 5 of 5 — Which Big Idea?
CSE 5 – Discussion Session
2011
Siri launches — people love it, then get frustrated
Big Idea: Natural Interaction
Siri could answer questions, but it missed context, misheard accents, and broke on anything ambiguous. Natural language is hard — it's packed with cultural assumptions and unstated meaning.
💬 Why is talking to a computer naturally so much harder than searching Google?
AI Tools — Where Are We Now?
CSE 5 – Discussion Session
Survey – What’s your interests?
CSE 5 – Discussion Session
AI tool introduction – Tool Card
CSE 5 – Discussion Session
Preview – How to write a good prompt?
CSE 5 – Discussion Session
1
Give it a role + context
Who is it? Who are you? What's the situation?
2
Specify the output format
Length, structure, tone, what to include/skip.
3
Give an example (few-shot)
Show it what good looks like — don't just describe it.
4
Iterate, don't rewrite
Good prompts are conversations, not one-shots.
5
Tell it what NOT to do
Constraints are as powerful as instructions.