Here is the reading that was handed out in class today:
Science’s Endless Golden Age by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Please read it before Wednesday’s class (November 2).

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.

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!)

Here are the materials for Class 11: Slides [PPTX], Notes [PDF]

The highly recommend reading from Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter is here: Little Harmonic Labyrinth / Chapter 5: Recursive Structures and Processes. (Sorry I wasn’t able to print enough copies before class today. If you print it yourself, make sure to check the “Auto-Rotate and Center” option. If you want a printed copy, let me know and I will bring more to class Monday.)