Comments

As a senior at MIT, I am not surprised that he struggled with 8.01 for several reasons. 1. It is a hard class. Many of the actual students were confused too. I know I struggled with the math. 2. No recitations! 8.01 has two or three hour long recitations a week with a professor. You work problems and ask questions. With ocw, you only get half of the instruction. 3. No textbook. The 8.01 textbook is well written, and useful. I spent many hours re-reading sections. 4. What about problem sets? They should be online as well, with solutions, but you didn't mention doing them. You actually understand the material by working problems. You would have to be some sort of mega-genius to lean without them. 5. Other students. On my hall, there is a pset party every night where the freshmen work on the 8.01/8.02 problem set together. I know I wouldn't have survived without friends who had a better understanding of the math. Anyway, that's my two cents. Don't feel bad for "droping" the class :)

Also, think about how much more efficient the human brain is. The 800 parallel processors must take up huge amounts of space and draw a ton of power compared to the brain. So while we can build a better computer by just throwing more resources at it until it gets good enough, the human brain is still in a sense much much better at solving the problem.