Readings from The Information, Schedule Update

The original course syllabus has a quiz scheduled for September 28. We will not have quiz then.

Chapters 5-7 of The Information relate to things we do in class. Some of the things we have seen already, and others we will go into more depth on later in the class. It is not required for you to read these until October 26 (when I do plan to have a quiz to provide some added encouragement for everyone to read them), but you may find it more useful to read them earlier. In particular, Chapter 5 includes Boolean logic and encoding the alphabet (which we also do in Problem Set 4). Chapter 6 includes Claude Shannon and his work on using electricity to perform logical functions (it also mentions Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which we’ll talk about in more detail later in the course). Chapter 7 talks about Alan Turing and the Turing Machine model, as well as how he used it to prove a fundamental limit on what can be computed (we haven’t talked about this in class yet, but we will later and in Chapter 12 of the course book). It also covers Turing and Shannon’s work on encryption.

I do hope everyone reads these chapters and gets a lot out of them, but prefer to give you more time to do this than having to do it under the pressure of an upcoming quiz. So, you have more than a month to finish reading these chapters at your own pace (but please don’t wait until October 25 to start reading them!)