Exam Information

All readings are from the textbook Explorations in Computing. Additional readings will be assigned as necessary.

DATES	TOPICS	CHAPTER
8/29-9/2	A Brief History of Computation from Babbage to the World Wide Web	1
9/5-9/9*	An Introduction to Programming using Ruby variables, types, statements, functions	2
9/12-9/16	Algorithms loops, conditionals, GCD, Sieve of Eratosthenes	3
9/19-9/23	Computation using Iteration using arrays, linear search, selection sort, order of complexity	4
9/26-9/30	Recursive Thinking binary search, merge sort, fractals, and other recursive algorithms	5
10/3-10/7	Data Organization lists, stacks, queues, hash tables, trees and graphs	6
10/10-10/14	Data Representation integers, text, images, sound and compression	7
10/17-10/21**	Computer Organization Boolean logic, CPU layers as abstractions, instructions as data and data as instructions	8
10/24-10/28	Randomness in Computation random number generators, shuffling, games with random numbers, cellular automata	9
10/31-11/4	Concurrency sorting networks, pipelining, and mulitasking
11/7-11/11	The Internet design of the Internet, network layers as abstractions, security/RSA
11/14-11/18	Simulations graphics in Ruby, N-body simulation	11
11/21-12/2***	Artificial Intelligence ELIZA and the Turing Test, games (search space and heuristics), Watson and machine learning	10
12/5-12/9	Computability: The Limits of Computation Map coloring and the traveling salesperson, P vs. NP, The halting problem	12

*No class 9/5 (Labor Day)
**No class 10/21 (Midterm Break)
***No classes 11/23-11/25 (Thanksgiving Break)