James Cameron might’ve told us that Judgement Day was on August 29, 1997 in Terminator 2, but since Stanford University’s School Of Engineering is offering Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (CS221) as a free online course for everyone this semester, it could be any day now.

Starting October 10th, the class spans 10 weeks and includes two video lectures per week on topics like machine learning, Markov models, robotics and robot motion planning, decision processes and adversarial planning.

Unless you’re enrolled as a student at Stanford, you won’t get college credit but you will get a statement of accomplishment signed by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig – the two professors – upon completion. For those who aren’t looking for something too strenuous (well, I should say MORE strenuous), there’s a basic track with includes the lectures and basic quizzes. If you’re looking to really get into it and work on a collegiate level, try the advance track which includes homework assignments, tests and deadlines (blah).

Sebastian Thrun is a Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, a Google Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the German Academy of Sciences. He’s best known for his research in robotics and machine learning, including his self-driving car which was named one of the 50 best inventions of 2010 by Time Magazine.

Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google Inc. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery, and co-authored Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which is the world’s most popular text book on Artificial Intelligence. He also used to be the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA’s senior computer scientist.

There’s already over 50,000 people signed up for this course (myself included), which means one of us is destined to create Skynet.