Damn, now I had to add it to my watch list in Coursera, seems very interesting. Of course, my background is in maths, so even if I did no machine learning back then I know how to fill the gaps as needed and as fast as possible. If someone just rang my door and told me he passed ML without any prior programming experience, I'd hire him: it definitely shows an incredible will and self-learning ability. In my case... Well, I got to know a little better some formalisms of machine learning, and also got me thinking more about ML problems, which is fun and gets me brewing with interesting ideas.
Discreet Optimization is full of fertile ideas. And they're all NP hard. And that means that any success is meaningful. It inspired me to work on getting the tools I need for another assault.
