CS 201 - Spring 2025. 4/16/2025.

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Welcome to CS 201!

Video of the Day

TechHistory: The Story of The First Computer Bug.

I hereby solicit suggestions for the video of the day. Please email me your ideas with explanations. Selected entries will win 5 homework points. If your video is played at the beginning of class, you must also briefly explain something about the video and something about yourself - in person.

Logical Problem of the day

Using the most powerful telescope ever made, let's call it the Bubble Telescope, just for fun, scientists happen to observe a class of young aliens on a planet millions of light-years away.

So, they look through the telescope and they see aliens in a classroom, millions of light-years away. So, this alien classroom has teachers and students. And on the chalkboard, the scientists can see the following equations are written. 

13 + 15 = 31

10 x 10 = 100

6 x 3 = 24
And the question is, how many fingers do these aliens have? (from Car Talk)

https://pollev.com/slade You may also download the app to your phone. Use the "slade" poll id.

Canvas Quiz of the Day (need daily password)

Most days, there will be a simple canvas quiz related to the lecture. You need a password to activate the quiz, which I will provide in class. These quizzes will count toward your class participation grade. The quiz is available only during class.

Click for today's quiz.

Lecture 34: Strings and Languages + HW7.

  • I have office hours Wednesdays from 4-6 pm, on zoom, id 459 434 2854.

  • I am available for lunch on Mondays at 1 pm in Morse.

  • ULA office hours are found at https://csofficehours.org/CS201/schedule. Sign up via the queue.

  • Homework assignments: [Assignments]. hw8 is now available.

    AI in the News

  • Access to the Atlantic
  • Access to Economist (Economist.com)
  • Access to Financial Times
  • Access to Wall Street Journal from Yale.
  • Q and AI Bloomberg.
  • Access to Bloomberg.com from Yale.

    Announcements

  • If you have an upcoming performance or athletic event, I am happy to promote it during class. Just send me a note.

  • Information Society Project Yale Law School. Weekly Events

  • That Whole "Yale Thing" Video compilation of references to Yale in movies. Friday April 25, 7pm, HQ L02. (list of movies)

    Bulldog Days: Wednesday, April 23rd

    You should plan to attend in person to be available to chat up the prospective first years about CS, Yale, and life after high school. You were once in their shoes.

    CS 201 Jeopardy Wednesday, April 23rd

    On Wednesday April 23rd, we will have an in class Jeopardy competition. Question topics will include racket, Turing machines, UNIX, boolean functions, and digital circuits and gates. Here is an example in another domain.

    Students may compete as individuals or teams. If you wish to compete, send me a note indicating the members of your team.

    The members of the winning team get 10 homework points each. The runners-up get 5 homework points each.

    Final Exam: Monday, May 5th, 7pm, RTBA

    The exam will be three and a half hours long. You should have plenty of time.

    Here is a practice exam. (solutions). (final.rkt code for solutions) Ignore questions 1, 6, 7(c), 7(e), and 10. We will cover box and pointer notation. Plus Turing Machines and UNIX, through principle 6, that is, everything. Practice TC-201 programs. solutions. Since TC 201 was not on the second midterm, it will be emphasized on the final.

    If your grade on the final exam is higher than your lower midterm grade, it will replace that grade. The quality of mercy is not strained.

  • SAS students:
    Please remind your students to sign up to reserve a space with us through their SAS Accommodate portal:

    Lecture: Strings and Languages.

    Strings.html (jupyter) compilers

  • Natural Language Corpus Data Norvig, 2009. Beautiful Data (the book) (online at Yale) (the actual data)
  • Beautiful Code O'Reilly, 2007. (online at Yale)
  • N-gram models of text generation (from AIMA 4th edition, Norvig and Russell. chapter 23, page 832.)
    To get a feeling for what word models can do, we built unigram, bigram, trigram, and 4-gram models over the words in this book and then randomly sampled sequences of words from the models. The results are

  • Unigram: logical are as are confusion a may right tries agent goal the was
  • Bigram: systems are very similar computational approach would be represented
  • Trigram: planning and scheduling are integrated the success of naive Bayes model is
  • n = 4: taking advantage of the structure of Bayesian networks and developed various languages for writing “templates” with logical variables, from which large networks could be constructed automatically for each problem instance.

    Added the King James Bible to the 4-gram model yielding these random samples:

  • Prove that any 3-SAT problem can be reduced to simpler ones using the laws of thy God.
  • Masters, give unto your servants that which is true iff both P and Q in any model m by a simple experiment: put your hand unto, ye and your households for it is pleasant.
  • Many will intreat the LORD your God, Saying, No; but we will ignore this issue for now; Chapters 7 and 8 suggest methods for compactly representing very large belief states.
  • And it came to pass, as if it had no successors.
  • The direct utility estimation is just an instance of the general or algorithm in which new function symbols are constructed “on the fly.” For example, the first child of the Holy Ghost.

    • hw7 review. reload provide statement to make autograder happy.

  • NLP Progress Repository to track the progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including the datasets and the current state-of-the-art for the most common NLP tasks.
  • C4 (Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus)
  • Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space the word2vec paper, by Jeff Dean and the Google guys. 2011.

    Getting to know UNIX

    UNIX Introduction Principle 5.
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