tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post465265456253349671..comments2024-03-10T05:26:42.148-04:00Comments on My Biased Coin: Broadening the Teaching of TheoryMichael Mitzenmacherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06738274256402616703noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-76967372879641175002007-10-17T20:40:00.000-04:002007-10-17T20:40:00.000-04:00Sanjeev Arora taught a course called "The Computat...Sanjeev Arora taught a course called "The Computational Universe" at Princeton aimed at non-majors. See the page for the course blog: http://courseblog.cs.princeton.edu/spring06/cos116/ <BR/>I think it actually included theory of computation material such as the Halting problem.<BR/><BR/><BR/>Its description is the following:<BR/><BR/>Computers have brought the world to our fingertips. We will try to understand at a basic level the science -- old and new -- underlying this new Computational Universe. Our quest takes us on a broad sweep of scientific knowledge and related technologies: propositional logic of the ancient Greeks (microprocessors); quantum mechanics (silicon chips); network and system phenomena (internet and search engines); computational intractability (secure encryption); and efficient algorithms (genomic sequencing). Ultimately, this study makes us look anew at ourselves -- our genome; language; music; "knowledge"; and, above all, the mystery of our intelligence.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-76698711099608570552007-10-17T11:51:00.000-04:002007-10-17T11:51:00.000-04:00I should have stressed that my Bits course is real...I should have stressed that my Bits course is really about information theory and communications theory, not computability theory or formal systems. It would be tough to teach that material to non-scientists - unless they were philosophically inclined.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-56000082176564567582007-10-17T06:58:00.000-04:002007-10-17T06:58:00.000-04:00I'm not sure that the only way to make material re...I'm not sure that the only way to make material relevant to non-computer scientists is by picking "real world" examples that demonstrate ideas. I suspect it suffices to communicate concepts using visual intuitions.<BR/><BR/>It has been my experience that the "Theory of Computation" is an utterly incomprehensible block of material to most people (including majors as often as not) when taught with most textbooks. However, there is a drastically different response with Michael Sipser's book which does a great job of getting across the key ideas without getting bogged down in the subtleties.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-35364562118275198902007-10-16T20:44:00.000-04:002007-10-16T20:44:00.000-04:00I love teaching Bits. But I can't take sole credit...I love teaching Bits. But I can't take sole credit for it --- Hal Abelson has helped me with it, and he has an unerring sense of why stuff matters. Also Ken Ledeen, a longtime friend and colleague who is a local software consultant. The three of us are writing a book aimed at an even bigger audience, trying to inform the public about decisions that are being taken without public involvement or even awareness. It's to be called "Blown to Bits: Peril and Promise of the Digital Explosion." It should be out this spring. (On the assumption we finish writing it, that is.)<BR/><BR/>The big challenge in teaching this course is persuading the non-science students who take it that they are actually capable of understanding the material and reasoning through the problems. They are perfectly smart but they are used to doing math by table-lookup, as it were, slotting the SAT questions into one of a finite number of categories and pulling out the corresponding equation. So they have a lot of trouble with a question that doesn't correspond to any part of high school math, such as, "If it takes a year to crack a 32-bit key, how long would it take to crack a 64-bit key? How long would it take in five years, if Moore's law continues to hold?" The official rubric of the course is "Quantitative Reasoning," which is exactly right. It teaches people to think quantitatively, a skill it sometimes seems they lost around the time they entered high school and started their SAT preparation.<BR/><BR/>The other thing that has been great about teaching this course is that I've been able to get in terrific guest lecturers. I got MA congressmen who are very concerned about privacy and telecomm legislation. I got a guy from a spook agency. I got Harvard and MIT librarians together to do a panel on the future of libraries. <BR/><BR/>Finally, every student has to do a project, and they have to do them in teams. The projects require going out into the field and talking to people whose lives are changing because of the revolution. So we had a great project on dairy farming (some are flourishing because of automation, some are going out of business) and another about used book stores (ditto). This was the best part of the course for several students, as it made things much more real, and they'd never taken a course that involved anything but library research.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-47046399772619912792007-10-16T14:08:00.000-04:002007-10-16T14:08:00.000-04:00There's another class at Princeton taught by Kerni...There's another class at Princeton taught by Kernighan (see <A HREF="http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall07/cos109/" REL="nofollow">here</A>) for humanities & social sciences majors. According to the webpage,<BR/><BR/>"COS 109 is intended to provide a broad, if rather high level, understanding of how computer hardware, software, networks, and systems operate. Topics will be motivated by current issues and events, and will include discussion of how computers work; what programming is and why it is hard; how the Internet and the Web operate; and how all of these affect security, privacy, property and other issues. We will also touch on fundamental ideas from computer science, and some of the inherent limitations of computers."Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15226933018680959889noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8890204.post-4323401963080539642007-10-16T01:59:00.000-04:002007-10-16T01:59:00.000-04:00More on the comm/info theory side of things, there...More on the comm/info theory side of things, there's a class at Princeton on wireless that was apparently one of the most popular classes on campus -- it was also a mix of technical, policy, and culture surrounding wireless communications. Vince Poor was in charge of it.asarwatehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07587164580336503000noreply@blogger.com