Re: The Sciences of the Artificial applied to Biology

I blame comp sci/software marketing who've has been calling anything more sophisticated than a bubble sort an "intelligent algorithm" for like 40 years.

In many schools it probably *is*!  I've seen curricula where "search"
was a semester long class as they tackled a particular search
algorithm each week (instead of dealing with ALL of them in a single
session).

Stuff like Bayesian inference and A* search should be in a data structures and algorithms course but they put it in the "Artificial Intelligence" course cuz when you put course titles with the word "algorithms" in it students are like "shit the homework's just going to be a lot of irritating Big Oh runtime analysis questions", it unearths past trauma, and they're not signing up for that.

It was in my "Introduction to Algorithms" class -- along with things like
CORDIC, traveling salesmen, readers-writers, etc.  A freshman class.
As was the AI class (Patrick Winston) which dealt with things like scene
analysis, autonomous agents, etc.
[A friend took a graduate level class at Northwestern University and
quickly discovered it was the freshman undergrad class he had already taken!]
Compiler design & language design classes were "second year" classes along
with things like public key encryption (new, at that time), key exchange
algorithms, zero-knowledge, etc.