News:

• 10/13 New room for TA hours Vanessia and Damien will start holding hours in our regular classroom. Same as last time, please call 3-6050 and someone will let you up.


• 10/13 Midterm #1 dictionary can be found in /usr/share/dict called words


• 10/12 Midterm proposal deadline has been postponed to 10/15


• 10/12 Extra hours today, 6-9pm (6-8 Tom, 8-9 Vanessia) in our regular classroom. Call 3-6050 and someone will let you up.


• 10/4 This weekend is a long weekend (Columbus day!) so Damien will not be holding his regular hours. Vanessia will still have hours on Thursday from 8-10pm.
  To help you get more organized with the various handouts, we have just added a new Exercises page which contains all the in-class handouts. It also won't be a bad idea to read over the Midterm under Assignments page.


• Intro. Tutorials will be held in the Sunlab on the 1st floor of the CIT on Monday, 9/12 at 6-7pm and Tuesday, 9/13 at 8-9pm. Remember, you only need to attend one of the two. If you cannot attend either, please email us.
• Welcome to CS9-2!

What is it?

CS009-02 is a freshman seminar providing an introduction to the field of computer science. Both prospective concentrators and those merely interested in computer science can benefit from the course. Though there will be some programming in the course, the goal of the course is not to teach students how to program but to give students a clear idea of what computer science is all about. No prior background in programming is required.

What will I learn?

While not meant to be exhaustive survey of computer science, this course examines a wide range of topics from digital logic and machine language to artificial intelligence and searching the World Wide Web. These topics are explored by interacting with programs while considering such questions as:

• How can a computer learn to recognize junk email?
• What happens when you click on a link in a browser?
• How can we program a robot to do two things at once?
• What can evolutionary biology teach us about computation?
• How can we find what we're looking for on the World Wide Web?

You'll learn answers to these questions by experimenting with small fragments of programs and learning to string these fragments together to simulate the behavior of more complicated programs.

Questions?

If you have any questions, feel free to send email to Tom Dean, the professor in charge of the course.