News (Posted September 7)
In general, I will post announcements on the quercus page for CSC196 and will also use this web page.
General Announcements
I will be announcing my regular office hours once the term begins and I know more about my schedule. However, I always welcome questions and wll be using piazza as an additional means
of communication. If you want to schedule an individual meeting,
it is best to email me for an appointment and I am sure
we can find mutually suitable times to "meet" where meet might mean in person or mean meet via zoom or skype.
You may be interested in starting or joining a recognized study group for this course or any course
This page will provide WWW access to various documents concerning CSC196.
See also the references given in previous versions of the course.
Please send any comments or questions to the instructor or the teaching
assistant.
Previous Offerings
CSC196 is one of the First Year Foundations Seminars in the Faculty of Arts and Science. CSC196 is a modified version of previous courses listed as SCI199 during the
1999-2000, 2001-2002, 2002-2003, 2003-2004, 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years. Note that these SCI 199 were taught as full year (two term) courses. Given that our CSC196 course is a one term course, we will have to be the less ambitious in our choice of topics.
About CSC196
We will pursue the general theme of GREAT
IDEAS in COMPUTING (including some surprising algorithms). The ambitious goal
is to try to identify some of the
great ideas that have significantly influenced the
field and made computing so pervasive. We will concentrate on mathematical, algorithmic and software ideas with
the understanding that the importance and usefulness of these ideas depends upon
(and often parallels) the remarkable ideas and progress in computing and
communications hardware. As we will see, many great ideas were initially against the ``prevailing opinion''.
In 2008 the
Computing Community Consortium was asking the
computing research community to
help identify "game-changing advances from computing research conducted
in the past 20 years."
See the game-changing blog post .
It will be interesting to update this blog to reflect the last 12 years since 2008. For example, we plan to discuss the success (and possible limitations) and concerns (e.g., meaningful employment) regarding deep learning and large language models. See, for example,
Bill Gates warning . More alarming, there was a Septmber 7 podcast about an AI cyber attack (see AI-cyber-attack . See also, the September 12, 2026 essay in the NYT by Dario Amodel, CEO of Anthropic . Another recent topic of interest is social networks and the way information (and mis-information) is spread on social networks. Information spread has become a major topic of discussion especially as it significantly impacts political opinions. See, for example,
Starbird et al paper on strategic information spread.
We may also discuss bias and fairness in machine learning algorithms. See, for example, NY Times article on facial recognition.
. Also see Axios article on the impact of AI wth regard to hate speech and a text file below with some links to articles concerning social media and the issue of hate speech, bias and divisive spread of information.
This page will provide WWW access to various documents concerning CSC196.
Some announcements may also be made on this page. See also piazza (once it is initialized) and Quercus.
Assignments and Quizzes
Assignments will be posted here and will be submitted on Markus. The two quizzes will be conducted in person.
Assignments are expected to
be handed in on time, as specified in the due date of the assignemnt. We will state clearly (and Markus enforced) precise rules about the penalties for late submissions.
The penalty for a late assignment is 5% for each 24 hours up to 48 hours. No further extensions are allowed without a valid documented reason (e.g., sickness with a doctors letter). IMPORTANT: You can submit multiple times. I suggest you submit a version in advance of the due date to be sure you can upload onto Markus successfully.
Assignment 0
A simple introductory assignment.
Assignment 1 First assignment is complete.
Slides for Class Meetings wll be posted here sometime after the class
Class 1
Course organization and motivating the course.
Class 2
Great ideas can have negative consequences. Possible topics for the course
Class 3
Our first great idea: the von Neumann model
Class 4
Thew importance of abstraction. The von Neumann model. The memory hierarchy and caching/paging. Start Data Types.
Class 5
Review of floating point numbers. Data strucres for the Dictionary data type. .
Class 6
The pros and cons of Data structures for the Dictionary data type.
Some comments on asymptotic time bounds.
Class 7
Today, we had a guest presentation on Quantum Computation by Professor Peter Love. Here are his slides.
Some Previous Tutorial Notes from 2003
Readings, Slides and Vidoes
A short video on
Computability
A short video on
P vs NP
My slides for the first week of CSC303s20
which provides graph theory definitions and examples of networks.
Text file containing
links relating to
social media and concerns regarding hate speech, bias, and targetting communities
The Dartmouth Summer 1955 AI Project
The 7 Worst Tech Predictions of all Time
For a discussion about the nature of research and the future of ML see Geoff Hinton's commencement address at IIT-Mumbai
Geoff Hinton';s warning regarding the existential threat of AI see
CNN August, 2025 News article on talk by Geoff Hinton
CBS 60 minutes interview with a Facebook whistleblower
A biography of Charles Babbage . Link provided by Sarah from the New Hampshire Technology Club.