Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch. None of that existed.
But what I remember doing a lot of was coding in Lisp - a lot of Lisp in the dark University of Guelph CIS lab.
Lisp is a cool language. It was many years ago now, but I recall writing a lisp interpreter in lisp for a college project. It was only ~100 lines of code and my recollection is that it worked remarkably well.