SCI199 Home Page (September 2008 - April 2009)

[ Previous offerings | Contacts & Overview | Assignments | Tutorial Notes | Readings | FORUM | Course Information]

Here is a list of possible topics

News!

Announcements for week of November 17.

This week we are discussing the history and concepts relating to the internet and the web. We will start Thursdays class going over your "search experience" based on assignment 3. I was recently sent this UTUBE video on the "exponential times" we are living in . It might be useful to consider the video with some care. What is a (documentable) fact and what is speculation?

General Announcements

I will be holding my regular office hours on Wednesdays 10:30-11:30 and 1:30-2:30. If these office hours conflict with your classes, please let me know and I will try to make alternative arrangments. In fact, it is always best to email me for an appointment and I am sure we can find mutually suitable times to meet. I encourage you to ask questions about the assignment (or any aspect of the course) in office hours or in class.

There is another upcoming seminar that should be of immediate interest to students in SCI199. Consider attending Prabhakar Raghavan's distinguished lecture .

It is clear from assignment A0 that many students can benefit from the various University resources available to help students improve their writing ability. Please consider the resoureces mentioned below.

Instead of a newsgroup, there will be a web forum for this class. Visit it here. There is also a link to it at the top of the page that you can also use. We will continue to post course announcments at this site.

In case you don't know, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences sponsors a "First-year Learning Community (FLC)" to help first-year students get the most out of their University life (for more details, see FLC ). Unfortunately, enrollment seems to be full but you can still put your name on a waiting list. You should also take note of the following resources:

  • Writing at University website
  • College Writing Centres
  • Learning English as a Second Language
  • How not to plagarize

    • Previous Offerings

    This version of SCI199 will be similar to previous versions taught during the 1999-2000, 2001-2002, 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 academic years

    Course Overview

    We will pursue the general (and very debatable) theme of GREAT IDEAS in COMPUTING. The ambitious goal is to try to identify the great ideas that have significantly influenced the field. 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. The list of topics we shall discuss will depend to some degree on the background and interests of the class. Here you can find a list of some possible course topics . It is interesting (relevant to this course) that the Computing Community Consortium is 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 .

    This page will provide WWW access to various documents concerning SCI199. Some of these documents are electronic versions of handouts given out in class. Some announcements will also be made on this page. See also the forum site given in the links above. Please send any comments or questions to the instructor Allan Borodin (bor ..funnyatsign ..cs.toronto.edu) or the teaching assistant Mark McCartin-Lim (markml..funnyatsign ..cs.toronto.edu).

    Assignments

    Assignment 0 is now available. This assignment will be a small part of the participation component of the grading scheme.

    Assignment 1 is now available. This assignment will be count as 10% of the grade. It is meant to be a relatively easy assignment.

    Assignment 2 is now available and due October 20.

    Assignment 3 is now available and due November 17 which is one week later than originally announced.

    Assignments and the project are expected to be handed in on time, at the beginning of the lecture/tutorial in which they are due. Any assignment which is submitted late will be penalized 20%, no assignment will be considered if more than one week late.

    Previous Tutorial Notes from 2003

    Readings

    We will begin the course by discussing the basic von Neumann architecture . Approximately 60 years after being articulated, the von Neumann architecture is still (at a high level) the basic architecture underlying modern computers. Some might argue that multi-core machines are now starting to force us to go beyond the von Neumann moidel at the moment but the model still represents our high level view of a computer. Further discussion of the von Neumann architecture and some assopciated history can be found at these sites:
  • Riley article
  • Wikipedia article on Herman Goldstine
  • Answers.com aricle
  • Wikipedia article on von Neumann architecture

    It is also interesting to look at the discussion concerning the forgotten Zuse machine .

    For those interested in the birthday paradox, here is the Wikipedia article on birthday paradox and another birthday paradox explanation which also lets you calculate similar probabilities.

    Here is the Wikipedia discussion of floating point representation .

    Here is the link for those interested in the history of computing site that I used in class. Many other sites are available. The history timeline used in class does seem to emphasize U.S. based contributions to the field. You might want to look at a more European history of computing . It is also fair to say that the University of Toronto was actively involved in the early history of computing as can be learned from William's article on U.Toronto Computation Centre and Hume's article on software for Ferut computer . Toronto faculty members Kelly Gotlieb and J. Patterson Hume were pioneers in the early development of computing.

    There are many sites that provide a discussion of Turing machines and gives examples and simulations for particular computational problems. Here is one such Turing machine site . And here is Turing's famous paper .

    Perhaps no topic is more widely discussed on the web than web search engines. We'll provide a very small selection of some interesting readings. I strongly suggest everyone to read an exceptionally prophetic 1945 article by Vannevar Bush . (In particular, see sections 6 and 7 for the concept of hyperlinks.) We mentioned in class that Google doesn't make it easy to find out specifics about their capabilites and methods. This 2004 Farach-Colton article is somewhat dated but still very interesting. One of the reasons that Google is so secretive can be understood from this article on Google ranking and spamming . For those interested in search anomalies, here is an article on the OR anomaly . At the end of the October 27 class, I was asked about how search engines accomodate for geographical location .

    Allan Borodin, Mark McCartin-Lim; 2008.