Exam Information

Readings are from the textbooks Explorations in Computing (EC) and Blown to Bits (BB). Additional readings will be assigned as necessary.

DATES	TOPICS	READINGS
8/27-8/31	A Brief History of Computation from Babbage to the World Wide Web	EC Ch. 1, BB Ch. 1
9/3-9/7*	An Introduction to Programming using Ruby variables, types, statements, functions	EC Ch. 2, BB Ch. 2 pp. 19-42
9/10-9/14	Algorithms loops, conditionals, GCD, Sieve of Eratosthenes	EC Ch. 3
9/17-9/21	Computation using Iteration using arrays, linear search, selection sort, order of complexity	EC Ch. 4
9/24-9/28	Recursive Thinking binary search, merge sort, fractals, and other recursive algorithms	EC Ch. 5
10/1-10/5	Data Organization lists, stacks, queues, hash tables, trees and graphs	EC Ch. 6 Optional: Touretzky 8.1, 8.2, 8.4, 8.6, 8.8, 8.9
10/8-10/12	Data Representation integers, text, images, sound and compression	EC Ch. 7, BB Ch. 3
10/15-10/19**	Computer Organization Boolean logic, CPU layers as abstractions, instructions as data and data as instructions	EC Ch. 8
10/22-10/26	Randomness in Computation random number generators, shuffling, games with random numbers, cellular automata	EC Ch. 9
10/29-11/2	Concurrency sorting networks, pipelining, and mulitasking	BB Ch. 4 pp. 109-137
11/5-11/9	The Internet design of the Internet, network layers as abstractions, security/RSA	BB Ch. 5 and Appendix A
11/12-11/16	Simulations graphics in Ruby, N-body simulation	EC Ch. 11
11/19-11/30***	Artificial Intelligence ELIZA and the Turing Test, games (search space and heuristics), Watson and machine learning	EC Ch. 10
EC Ch. 12/3-12/7	Computability: The Limits of Computation Map coloring and the traveling salesperson, P vs. NP, The halting problem	EC Ch. 12

*No classes 9/3 (Labor Day)
**No classes 10/19 (Mid-semester Break)
***No classes 11/21-11/24 (Thanksgiving Holiday)