Misc
Nicole Tomei will be observing and sometimes helping with some classes as part of a directed study
Questions?
Matlab and Computers
Sections 1.1 through 1.3
What is abstraction? Examples other than in computing?
- Complexity/simplicity - hiding detail in order to emphasize minimal important features
- Examples
- Scientific laws, e.g., Newton’s law of gravitation abstracts observations about things falling in all sorts of ways, planetary orbits, etc. into a single reason why those things happen and an equation that describes the result
- Language, e.g., words are abstractions of concrete things, for instance “dog” and its dictionary definition capture some essence of dogginess without listing everything that makes an animal a dog; “happy” conveys an emotion that would otherwise have to be inferred from subtle combinations of body language, tone of voice, etc.
Is there any sort of information that can’t be represented and processed by a computer? Why or why not?
- All information is represented in binary (0 or 1) form - a universal representation of information
- Compiled vs interpreted languages?
- Computers store information about the program they are running
- Instructions are very low level: add 2 numbers, copy data from here to there, etc.
- Lower level than programming language instructions - abstraction gap
- Compiled language: compiler translates programming language commands into machine commands
- Interpreted language: interpreter reads programming language commands one by one, figures out what each means, and does it.
Where do networks (such as the Internet) fit in the diagram in Participation Activity 1.3.1?
- Think of a network as a source of and/or destination for information in main memory, parallel to disk.
- Alternatively, you could think of the network as feeding data to and getting it from disk, from which the data can then be moved to memory. But the model that connects the network to memory is a little closer to how actual computer hardware is set up.
Next
Arithmetic calculations in Matlab
Watch video introduction to arithmetic at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAer1yVLBLk (or watch it right here)