SUNY Geneseo Department of Computer Science

Introduction

Tuesday, January 22

CSci 242, Spring 2013
Prof. Doug Baldwin

(No Previous Lecture)

Welcome to CSci 242

About learning...

What is one thing you could do to ensure that you master the content of this course...
- Do problems in class (or out)
- Understand things before leaving class
- Study examples outside of class
Most people learn best by doing the thing they are trying to learn. Problem sets and in-class problem-solving are ways that happens in this course. Follow-up face-to-face meetings with me are an important part of doing the work.

Brute force: do the obvious, exhaustive, thing

Heuristic: procedures that don’t guarantee to solve the problem all the time, or to solve it in reasonable amounts of time

Example

Using on-line corpora of literature (e.g., Project Gutenberg) to break the book ciphers in the Beale Papers
Brute force: try the first document in the corpus, if it fails to produce recognizable words from a Beale document go on to the second, and so forth
Heuristics
- Exclude documents written after the alleged date of the Beale ciphers
- Exclude documents not in English
- Focus first on US historical documents from shortly before the Beale ciphers

Graphs

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