Sunday, October 30, 2011

Change in TA office hours

Teaching Assistant Deepal Dhariwal needs to change her Tuesday office hours from 9:30-11:00am to 1:00-2:30pm effective this week.

HW5 is out

Homework five is out and due on Wednesday November 9.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

John McCarthy dies, inventor of Lisp, AI pioneer

Computer Science pioneer John McCarthy reportedly died in his sleep on Monday. He was 84. He is noted for creating the Lisp programming language, making ground-breaking contributions to Artificial Intelligence (including naming the field), adding important results to the mathematical theory of computation, and helping to develop computer time sharing. He studied mathematics under John Nash at Princeton

McCarthy held the first “computer-chess” match between scientists in the US and the USSR, transmitting the moves by telegraph. The soviet team ran on inferior hardware and used Claude Shannon's brute-force Type-A strategy while the MIT team had an IBM 7090 implemented Shannon's more sophisticated Type-B approach that used a heuristic plausible move generator. The Soviets won.

McCarthy was born in 1927 in Boston and taught himself higher math using Caltech textbooks when his family moved to the area, allowing him to take advanced classes when he enrolled as a teenager. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1951.

He won the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1991. Over the years, he held faculty appointments at Princeton, M.I.T., Dartmouth, and Stanford University, where he spend his las 39 years.


Saturday, October 15, 2011

Midterm in class on Mon Oct 24

The 331 midterm exam will be given in class on Monday October 24. The exam will cover everything we discussed in class as well as the material in chapters 1-4 and 15 in our textbook.

A good way to prepare is to look at some of the previous midterm exams. You should also check in on the midterm forum on the 331 Blackboard site regularly.

The material covered in CMSC331 differs from semester to semester and instructor to instructor. You will not be held responsible for subjects or material that we did not cover in class, in a homework or ask you to read before October 24. The more recent midterms (e.g, since 2004) in sections that I've taught will be more relevant.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Monday, October 10, 2011

Maybe we should wait for the Dart native VM

The Dart compiler turns hello world into 17,260 lines of javascript?!?! See the code.

Dart: Google's new web programming language

Google unveiled its new web programming language Dart today. Its described as a "class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications". Dart has a native virtual machine and can also be compiled into JavaScript, allowing it to run on any modern browser. Google hopes that Dart will replace JavaScript as the main built-in scripting language in web browsers. See more here.