141–150 of 173 posts
He has another channel where he posts things that mainly pertain to Sipser's Computation. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/c/RyanDougherty/videos
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A lot of people give theory a lot of crap. But that's normally because they are not comfortable with the material. If you are comfortable with the material, you see applications for it all over the place, and use it all the time. Sure, you don't have to ground your system in some kind of formal model (you can just code-til-it-works), but when you do I've found it always ends up as a far simpler and more resilient pro…
I think people are ready for things at certain times. I think history class was wasted on me in high school because I was a kid and didn't have much life experience. But years later with a better grasp on human nature I think I would have had a better grasp. Another example is a foreign language class. I took it in middle school, in high school and later in college. I learned lots and lots of theory for many years. B…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people give theory a lot of crap. But that's normally because they are not comfortable with the material. If you are comfortable with the material, you see applications for it all over the place, and use it all the time. Sure, you don't have to ground your system in some kind of formal model (you can just code-til-it-works), but when you do I've found it always ends up as a far simpler and more resilient pro…
I found it also helps with the hardest problem in software development: naming things. Without knowledge of the theory it can be hard to come up with a descriptive name for some data structure/algorithm you created to solve your problem. With some knowledge of the theory you can more easily put a name to what you have created, making it easier for other people to understand and giving them something to Google if they…
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Web development, embedded systems, and game dev. I use FSMs, pushdown automata, and hierarchical state machines all the time.
What's amazing to me is how uncommon state machines are in software, comparatively. In ASIC and FPGA design, it's so fundamental and ubiquitous. At least with synchronous designs.
The vast majority of companies essentially code and design to the lowest common denominator so that their devs are fungible cogs.
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I think people are ready for things at certain times. I think history class was wasted on me in high school because I was a kid and didn't have much life experience. But years later with a better grasp on human nature I think I would have had a better grasp. Another example is a foreign language class. I took it in middle school, in high school and later in college. I learned lots and lots of theory for many years. B…
Agreed. The reason its not that way is that schools are mostly state-run daycare programs, setup so that parents can work, not a genuine implementation of skill building.
Interesting how so many of these problems are probably hard for a fraction of the people that want to pass this exam simply because of the language in which they are expressed. For example, and I've noticed this pattern with some regularity: large and complex expression in a paper or some other document. Actual implementation: one or more for loops with an add or a multiply in the body of the loop with some initializ…
That's an excellent question! It may be worth considering that the answer may not be as significant as some might guess. GATE is an exam that tests if you're ready for graduate school. Part of being ready for a specialized field is being fluent in the vocabulary and parlance used in that field, as this enables rapid learning and smooths communication. That you can understand the ideas if they are restated and re-expr…
As a math professor, I'm amazed that our students learn to answer exam questions about damped, driven systems without internalizing anything about the idea. Now, our pandemic is a damped, driven system and no one gets it. I love multiple choice. I aced Regents exams in high school by borrowing old study guides to memorize the missing half of the corpus. I recently had a great time taking the Triplebyte quiz inebriate…
These...don't seem that hard? I mean I just took a class on Theory of Computation but I did pretty poorly in it and stopped paying attention when we switched to online. Most of these seem to be CFG/RE questions with fairly simple answers. I'd expect some more challenging stuff with constructions from a graduate entrance exam.
I need to defend theory of computer science here, it seems. Please note that this computer science , not computer engineering . The idea of automata, regular languages, turing machines, and whatnot inform some of the most fundamental results of computer science . At least in the fields where I work [compilers, formal verification], all of the above theory is common parlance. Everyone working on this stuff knows all o…
A lot of people give theory a lot of crap. But that's normally because they are not comfortable with the material. If you are comfortable with the material, you see applications for it all over the place, and use it all the time. Sure, you don't have to ground your system in some kind of formal model (you can just code-til-it-works), but when you do I've found it always ends up as a far simpler and more resilient pro…
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But do those fields have a similar split between the language used by the theoretical and the practical side of things?
Generally no, because they do not have large populations of self-taught professional practitioners who never learned theory. Least common denominator writing is very useful for a great many things. It is wonderful and ideally suited for items aimed at a popular audience. It just may not always be ideal for efficient and precise technical communication.
Beyond that, I think you're selling an ideal here in these other professions that doesn't necessarily exist. There certainly is some vocabulary overlap but a huge problem in e.g. medicine is practicing doctors not being able to understand the science behind medicines and procedures that biased 3rd parties are recommending they offer to patients.