I stand corrected: since I took the curriculum, functional programming requirements seem to have been substituted with an option to do higher-level systems-engineering electives (such as 15-414). And the systems elective has been expanded to include parallel and distributed systems.
The key difference on the deep-theory side is that CS and AI appear to swap out deep-diving into discrete math for deep-diving into statistics and statistical modeling. I'd consider those different enough to warrant separate degree tracks, personally.
(Your opinion of networking is noted but I do not share it, being somewhat familiar with what that course asks of students. It's every bit as preparatory as its sibling 15-410 class ;) ).
>The key difference on the deep-theory side is that CS and AI appear to swap out deep-diving into discrete math for deep-diving into statistics and statistical modeling. I'd consider those different enough to warrant separate degree tracks, personally.
What discrete math classes were removed from the AI degree?
>(Your opinion of networking is noted but I do not share it, being somewhat familiar with what that course asks of students. It's every bit as preparatory as its sibling 15-410 class ;) ).
I looked over the syllabus and assignments for a section of that class. It looks like a bog standard networking class (bog standard for top tier schools that is). It's an elective. You can take an OS class, a compilers class, or a networking class. I don't think there is some intersection of knowledge/skill between those 3 classes, the absence of which would give higher-learning institutions pause.
My institution required that you take both an OS and a networking class before being admitted for graduate study. It's one thing if they require OS, and networking, and compilers. That they don't do that says to me that they don't consider them critical classes, since any given graduate could be missing any 2 of them.
We actually have a set of criteria for what makes a qualifying systems elective. As with many things at CMU, we don't generally care what details you learn. We care greatly what higher-level concepts you get exposed to, and the systems courses are the place we try to focus on the development of abstractions; modularity; isolation; reasoning about failures and complexity; integrating security concerns. They're also the courses where students are required to work on projects large enough to blow out their cache -- multi-week or month projects that force you to think reasonably about how you divide your design into pieces so that you can coherently reason about the ensemble.
We're pretty much equally happy if you hit layering in the network class or thinking about the filesystem and kernel VFS layers in the OS class - or the modular structure of a modern compiler. Tackling the idea of reliability through replication in distributed systems (via a lot of different mechanisms, but with a decent dose of Paxos), or via the Reliable Storage module in 15-410, or in DB. Getting additional hardware architecture exposure through compilers or the parallel class. Thinking about communication using a fast local interconnect (parallel), the internet (networks & DS), or IPC (OS). Compilers can be more or less of a systems course depending on who teaches it, but it's generally got such a strong architectural component that it flies.
It's much like programming languages. We don't care much if you graduate knowing a particular language -- any CMU CS graduate should be able to pick up a new language in short order. We care greatly that you've been exposed to a mix of programming styles and thinking -- imperative, functional, and logical or declarative, and can successfully use those tools to reason about code, program structure, algorithms, and data structures.
So no, we absolutely don't consider it critical that you take any specific systems course, but we do consider it critical -- for the CS major -- that you be exposed to the broad set of systems concepts we teach in them. That's why we start them in 15-213 and then reinforce them with one upper-division systems elective requirement.
>It's much like programming languages. We don't care much if you graduate knowing a particular language -- any CMU CS graduate should be able to pick up a new language in short order. We care greatly that you've been exposed to a mix of programming styles and thinking -- imperative, functional, and logical or declarative, and can successfully use those tools to reason about code, program structure, algorithms, and data structures.
I completely support this philosophy.
> Compilers can be more or less of a systems course depending on who teaches it
So what happens when it's less of a systems course? Do students taking that section lack a critical component of the CS major?
We encourage it back towards systemsy-ness. ;). (in other words - nothing's perfect, and we accept some occasional compromises in service of providing a diverse menu. Compilers has other value. If it got too PL-centric, we would just move it to the PL cluster, but it's generally stayed systems for the last decade.)
The key difference on the deep-theory side is that CS and AI appear to swap out deep-diving into discrete math for deep-diving into statistics and statistical modeling. I'd consider those different enough to warrant separate degree tracks, personally.
(Your opinion of networking is noted but I do not share it, being somewhat familiar with what that course asks of students. It's every bit as preparatory as its sibling 15-410 class ;) ).