Exam (elaborations) Computer Science 320201

This document contains the course notes for the course General Computer Science I & II held at Jacobs University Bremen1 in the academic years . Contents: The document mixes the slides presented in class with comments of the instructor to give students a more complete background reference. Caveat: This document is made available for the students of this course only. It is still a draft and will develop over the course of the current course and in coming academic years. Licensing: This document is licensed under a Creative Commons license that requires attribution, allows commercial use, and allows derivative works as long as these are licensed under the same license. Knowledge Representation Experiment: This document is also an experiment in knowledge representation. Under the hood, it uses the STEX package [Koh08, Koh14], a TEX/LATEX extension for semantic markup, which allows to export the contents into the eLearning platform PantaRhei. Comments and extensions are always welcome, please send them to the author. Other Resources: The course notes are complemented by a selection of problems (with and without solutions) that can be used for self-study. [Koh11a, Koh11b] Course Concept Aims: The course 320101/2 “General Computer Science I/II” (GenCS) is a two-semester course that is taught as a mandatory component of the “Computer Science” and “Electrical Engineering & Computer Science” majors (EECS) at Jacobs University. The course aims to give these students a solid (and somewhat theoretically oriented) foundation of the basic concepts and practices of computer science without becoming inaccessible to ambitious students of other majors. Context: As part of the EECS curriculum GenCS is complemented with a programming lab that teaches the basics of C and C ++ from a practical perspective and a “Computer Architecture” course in the first semester. As the programming lab is taught in three five-week blocks over the first semester, we cannot make use of it in GenCS. In the second year, GenCS, will be followed by a standard “Algorithms & Data structures” course and a “Formal Languages & Logics” course, which it must prepare. Prerequisites: The student body of Jacobs University is extremely diverse — in 2011, we have students from 110 nations on campus. In particular, GenCS students come from both sides of the “digital divide”: Previous CS exposure ranges “almost computer-illiterate” to “professional Java programmer” on the practical level, and from “only calculus” to solid foundations in discrete Mathematics for the theoretical foundations. An important commonality of Jacobs students however is that they are bright, resourceful, and very motivated. As a consequence, the GenCS course does not make any assumptions about prior knowledge, and introduces all the necessary material, developing it from first principles. To compensate for this, the course progresses very rapidly and leaves much of the actual learning experience to homework problems and student-run tutorials. Course Contents Goal: To give students a solid foundation of the basic concepts and practices of Computer Science we try to raise awareness for the three basic concepts of CS: “data/information”, “algorithms/programs” and “machines/computational devices” by studying various instances, exposing more and more characteristics as we go along. 1 International University Bremen until Fall 2006 iii Computer Science: In accordance to the goal of teaching students to “think first” and to bring out the Science of CS, the general style of the exposition is rather theoretical; practical aspects are largely relegated to the homework exercises and tutorials. In particular, almost all relevant statements are proven mathematically to expose the underlying structures. GenCS is not a programming course: even though it covers all three major programming paradigms (imperative, functional, and declarative programming). The course uses SML as its primary programming language as it offers a clean conceptualization of the fundamental concepts of recursion, and types. An added benefit is that SML is new to virtually all incoming Jacobs students and helps equalize opportunities. GenCS I (the first semester): is somewhat oriented towards computation and representation. In the first half of the semester the course introduces the dual concepts of induction and recursion, first on unary natural numbers, and then on arbitrary abstract data types, and legitimizes them by the Peano Axioms. The introduction and of the functional core of SML contrasts and explains this rather abstract development. To highlight the role of representation, we turn to Boolean expressions, propositional logic, and logical calculi in the second half of the semester. This gives the students a first glimpse at the syntax/semantics distinction at the heart of CS. GenCS II (the second semester): is more oriented towards exposing students to the realization of computational devices. The main part of the semester is taken up by a “building an abstract computer”, starting from combinational circuits, via a register machine which can be programmed in a simple assembler language, to a stack-based machine with a compiler for a bare-bones functional programming language. In contrast to the “computer architecture” course in the first semester, the GenCS exposition abstracts away from all physical and timing issues and considers circuits as labeled graphs. This reinforces the students’ grasp of the fundamental concepts and highlights complexity issues. The course then progresses to a brief introduction of Turing machines and discusses the fundamental limits of computation at a rather superficial level, which completes an introductory “tour de force” through the landscape of Computer Science. As a contrast to these foundational issues, we then turn practical introduce the architecture of the Internet and the World-Wide Web. The remaining time, is spent on studying one class algorithms (search algorithms) in more detail and introducing the notition of declarative programming that uses searc