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Things I learned from teaching (2023)

This spring, I taught an undergraduate class on chess engines. I probably learned more than any of my students.

As a senior in college, I was the instructor, lecturer, grader, master of ceremonies, and grand poobah of COLL 110: Artificial Intelligence for Chess, 6-7 P.M. every Tuesday for the whole semester. I have the patience to trawl through uncommented C++ code and ancient forum posts to figure out how to build a good chess engine, but the students shouldn't need it. Typically, I tried to integrate a mix of skill levels into my lectures; for instance, when discussing the representation of squares and directions, I spent a few minutes explaining how they could be modeled with torsors, but not so long that I would lose the students who neither knew nor cared about group theory.

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