Some students didn’t do as well on the quiz as I would have hoped. Unlike Quiz 2, this quiz really was very straightforward (with the possible exception of question #2 on the information in a nucleotide), so I have to assume that the only reason anyone got below a 4 on the quiz was because they aren’t keeping up with the reading assignments.

Since my main intent in the quizzes is to encourage you to actually do the reading (which I am pretty confident you will find worthwhile and interesting if you do), there is an opportunity to improve your quiz grade by demonstrating that you have read the chapters from The Information. You can do this by posting a comment here that either explains the most interesting thing you read in Chapters 7 and 8, or that raises an interesting question based on something you read in these chapters. Your comment should not substantially duplicate a previous comment. If you want to reply to a previous comment by contributing something new, though, that is encouraged.

Good comments will be enough to revise your Quiz 3 score to be full credit.

Class 27: Slides [PPTX]

Quiz 3 (with answers): [PDF]

Quiz 3 will be held as scheduled in class on Wednesday (26 October). It covers the course book through Chapter 10 and The Information
through the end of Chapter 8. The style and format will be similar to the first two quizzes, although I will aim to make the questions less tricky than quiz 2. If you’ve done the reading, you should be able to do well on the quiz Wednesday.

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!)

A few students have asked about Quiz 2, which was scheduled on the syllabus for Friday, Sept 16 (I’d forgotten about this last week when I threatened to add an extra quiz this week because of the evidence from Quiz 1 what too many students are not keeping up with the readings). Instead of having Quiz 2 on Friday, we will have it next Monday, 19 September. The quiz will cover:

• Problem Set 1 Comments
• Course book, Chapters 1-6
• The Information, Chapters 1-4 and Chapter 10
• This article from today’s notes: A Lost Spirit Still Inspires, Boston Globe, 4 September 2011.
• Classes 1-11 (through Friday’s class)

Like Quiz 1, the main point of the Quiz is to provide some extra encouragement for everyone to keep up with the course readings. The questions should be questions that anyone who has done the readings will be able to answer, rather than questions that required any actual thinking.