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Foundations of Computer Science

i.stanford.edu

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Re: Foundations of Computer Science

#81

Post by wh-uws »

Zergy wrote: post #58
signa11 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every professor seems to remove thier notes at the end of every semester and only post them when the content becomes relevent to the course. might this be possibly done because there is not too much variation in course content from one sem to next ?

I'm sure this is the reasoning but it’s a stupid reason. I joined a frat because they have a service where they upload all the notes by class and professor and that caused my average GPA per semester to jump nearly a point. It’s simply lazy, easy to game, makes crunches nearly unbearable, and interferes with the student’s ability to learn. It’s also why GT while it has a reputation on par with MIT is actually a much…

As a fellow GT grad I sadly couldn't agree more.

Unless you already know stuff or find a good group you're largely on your own.

Re: Foundations of Computer Science

#82

Post by mturmon »

Zergy wrote: post #58
signa11 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every professor seems to remove thier notes at the end of every semester and only post them when the content becomes relevent to the course. might this be possibly done because there is not too much variation in course content from one sem to next ?

I'm sure this is the reasoning but it’s a stupid reason. I joined a frat because they have a service where they upload all the notes by class and professor and that caused my average GPA per semester to jump nearly a point. It’s simply lazy, easy to game, makes crunches nearly unbearable, and interferes with the student’s ability to learn. It’s also why GT while it has a reputation on par with MIT is actually a much…

"GT while it has a reputation on par with MIT"

This is not the case. Best not to repeat this claim.

Re: Foundations of Computer Science

#83

Post by barry-cotter »

mturmon wrote: post #82
Zergy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure this is the reasoning but it’s a stupid reason. I joined a frat because they have a service where they upload all the notes by class and professor and that caused my average GPA per semester to jump nearly a point. It’s simply lazy, easy to game, makes crunches nearly unbearable, and interferes with the student’s ability to learn. It’s also why GT while it has a reputation on par with MIT is actually a much…

"GT while it has a reputation on par with MIT" This is not the case. Best not to repeat this claim.

If one is being extremely charitable (to the poster, not Georgia Tech) one could say that GATech is an elite engineering school but not super elite, like MIT. There is legitimate controversy over what the best university is for CS in the world. For what the top four are there isn't. They are CMU, MIT, Berkeley and Stanford. Georgia Tech has a really great reputation and every professor there is a very impressive researcher but it is not comparable to MIT.

Re: Foundations of Computer Science

#84

Post by dschiptsov »

jorgeleo wrote: post #28
dschiptsov wrote: post #17

1992 - a world without Java... And, you know, the book about foundations is... SICP.) OK, this is C Edition .

if "computer science is a science of abstraction — creating the right model for thinking about a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it" then language is of no importance

Language is a medium of expression of ideas (nothing in common with medium.com), so, less constrained it is the better. That is why Scheme in particular was chosen for SICP - it is small and expressive. It was a language for teaching, in good old times.))

Re: Foundations of Computer Science

#85

Post by RockyMcNuts »

Retric wrote: post #72
RockyMcNuts wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer science is the study of algorithms, information systems and anything that is computable. Mathematics is the study of formal systems, eg proofs that can be derived from axioms using algorithms, i.e. a specific type of computable system. Therefore, mathematics is a subset of computer science.

Math includes the study of non computable things. Also, Math includes chaos theory which is more than just a formal system. EX: computable numbers are a subset of all numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number

mostly kidding. but presumably the theorems about non-computable numbers are computable and therefore you're still working with computable things?

Re: Foundations of Computer Science

#87

Post by jontas »

wolfhumble wrote: post #68
jontas wrote: post #52

I downloaded and merged the individual PDFs into one file, you can grab it here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6428759/merged.pdf Edit: I did this using commands mentioned in some other comments and some Googling (this only works on OSX): curl -O http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs/ch[01-14].pdf && /System/Library/Automator/Combine\ PDF\ Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py -o ./merged.pdf ./*.pdf

Cool one-liner! Might want to switch the last part of the command, though, as all other pdf files in that folder get merged in as well (learned the hard way) :-) Something like this would probably be safer: curl -O http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs/ch[01-14].pdf && /System/Library/Automator/Combine\ PDF\ Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py -o ./merged.pdf ./ch[0-1][0-9].pdf

Sorry about that--I actually just created a new folder and moved into it before running the command, I probably should've mentioned that to prevent the issue you ran into.

Re: Foundations of Computer Science

#88

Post by ekns »

jontas wrote: post #52

I downloaded and merged the individual PDFs into one file, you can grab it here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6428759/merged.pdf Edit: I did this using commands mentioned in some other comments and some Googling (this only works on OSX): curl -O http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs/ch[01-14].pdf && /System/Library/Automator/Combine\ PDF\ Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py -o ./merged.pdf ./*.pdf

Here's a more portable version (works with bash, pdftk and wget):

wget http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs/ch{01..14}.pdf && pdftk ch*.pdf cat output merged.pdf

Re: Foundations of Computer Science

#89

Post by Zergy »

cobookman wrote: post #61
Zergy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one thing about GaTech that really annoys me. Every professor seems to remove thier notes at the end of every semester and only post them when the content becomes relevent to the course. You cant look ahead and cant reference them afterwards.

100% agree. As a member of SGA I did push for an online notes resource. It turned out to be a legal gray zone though.

I find this supprising, would you mine expanding on that?
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