Lecture 1 - Realfasfsdfas

6.
00: Introduction to Computer Science & Programming

Frdo Durand and Armando Solar-Lezama MIT EECS
Tuesday, February 5, 13
Stu I do with computers
Show of hands

Who has programmed before? Who knows Python? Who wants to be a CS major? Who thinks theyre going to be bad at programming? Who thinks they will need to program in their life? Whos here because its a requirement?
Introductions
Armando Solar-Lezama - Programming tools/languages - Program synthesis
Frdo Durand - Computer graphics - Computational photography
Course objectives
Course objectives
Prepare students without programming experience for course VI Help non-course VI students write programs Map scientic problems into computational framework Provide students with competence in computational problem solving (useful for urops & summer jobs)
Is programming hard?

Programming is not hard But you often dont get it right at rst - like most things - Persevere, edit, debug, divide and conquer
Everyone can be a programmers - Not necessarily a software architect who handles millions of lines of code - But everyone can use programming to solve practical problems
Dont get scared by keywords and details
Administrivia
Administrivia

Mostly web-based: stellar, piazza Signup on website for recitations Weekly programming problem sets 2 evening quizzes. First one around March 7 Final exam, closed book, 2 sheets of notes Textbook MITx material - lectures, nger exercises, low-grade version of book
Collaboration policy
Collaborate, dont plagiarize - Talk about psets, but write your own code - Good idea not to look at other peoples code
We will use plagiarism detection software - MOSS: http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/
Slightly dierent from past 6.00
Mostly same material, slightly different presentation and order Dont freak out too much if you cant answer all questions on old quizzes - But freak out a little bit
Problems Computer Science can solve

Path planning
Well cover a simple version

Airfare optimization
Biology
Slide by Manolis Kellis

Pandora, Spotify
Organize data, communicate
Simulation
Fluids, weather, structure, n-body, virus spread
Well cover a simple version

Search
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PageRanks-Example.svg https://dhs.stanford.edu/algorithmic-literacy/accessing-data/
Natural language processing, speech
Robots
Play chess, play jeopardy
3D reconstruction, face detection
Medical imaging
Computational thinking

Cognition as algorithms Human vision & computer vision Genetics as information processing
Problems one Programmer can solve

Psets from last year

Scrabble/Words With Friends inspired game Encryption/decryption RSS ltering Simple robot simulation Virus spread simulation Election prediction using randomized simulation Course load optimization Clustering census data
Keep track of workout

For the MIT frisbee team By Patricia Li, Physics major
Yearbook
Small team and too many photos/names/index to handle. Were about to miss the print deadline. After an hour of code: Script to automatically generate layout from pictures+names Unfortunately no duck-face correction script
Monty Hall probability paradox
You choose among three doors - one of them allows you to win a car
A B
Then the host tells you, for one of the doors you didnt choose, that it doesnt have a car You get a chance to change your mind: what should you do? Simulation was 20 lines of code
Simple problems
Tennis game probabilities - 60 lines of code Is 2048 the last power of two with only even digits? - 20 lines of code Web site ltering with chicken feet - 10 lines of easy code Designating TA volunteers - 3 lines of Pyhton~
Photo collages

N photos=> auto correspondence and layout About 3 months of 25%-time coding
Photo collages

N photos=> auto correspondence and layout About 3 months of 25%-time coding
Pentimento

I wanted to create a handwritten video lecture Online Sub No good tool
Non-Sequential Authoring I wrote my own software, Pentimento of

About 6 months at 25% of coding
Handw
(a) User records temporal lecture,
(b) retroactively edits layout,
From 6.815 (also in Python!)

HDR Panorama stitching Painterly lter Seamless pasting Morphing ...

A
Be
What problems would you solve?

Part of pset 0 Anything from frivolous to big challenges Well try to give you feedback: - A Harvard student could do it - You can do it at the end of 6.00 - You can do it at the end of course VI - Youll need a big team of programmers - So hard theyll create a Nobel prize in computer science just for this - This is the next Microsoft/Google/Facebook. Weve already stolen and patented your idea
What is Computation?
What you should remember
Programming is empowering and cool Imperative knowledge Computers are dumb and just follow steps Variables & assignment
Youre the computer! n=10 while n1: if isEven(n): n=n/2 else: n=n*3+1
Python tutor
http://www.pythontutor.com/
For your culture: Syracuse problem

Conjecture: always converges to 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture
Elements of a program
Variable
n=10 assignment
while n 1: control
test
if even(n): control
assignment
test
n=n/2
arithmetic
else: n=n*3+1
Dont forget

The computer has no purpose The computer doesnt understand the task The computer just does what you tell it to do
Declarative vs. imperative knowledge
Declarative: - statement of fact Imperative: - how-to recipe - also known as procedural
Declarative denition of
is the number so that the area of a circle or radius r is r2
Imperative version of pi

Area of circle of radius 1 Generate lots of points inside [-1 1] square Count point inside circle - they satisfy x*x+y*y<1
Computing pi
N=1000.0 numberInCircle=0.0 x=-1.0 while x<1.0: y=-1.0 while y<1.0: if x*x+y*y<1: numberInCircle=numberInCircle+1 y=y+1/N x=x+1/N print numberInCircle/(N*N)
Other example: Square root
Declarative: - square root of N is the number x such that 2 x =N
Imperative (Heron algorithm) - start with rough guess, e.g. x=N - While x2 too different from N - x=0.5*(x+N/x)
See 6.00x or the book for more
Recap: What computers do

Compute *, +, -, /, etc. including tests: >, ==, etc. Control: while, if Store in variable, described by names the = operator changes the stored value
Python & Idle
Why Python?

Easy syntax, concise Supports all styles of programming Widely used in science and engineering - lots of useful library Easy to transfer knowledge to other languages Cons: can be slow - but you can speed it up with Pypi
IDLE
Shell - where results are printed - where user-input is entered - can be used for on-the-y pogramming and experiments
Editor - to edit and rene longer pieces of code
Basic elements

Expressions Variables - Name - Value - Very different from math unknowns!
Assignment using = - Change the v
The = challenge
= in computer science is very different from = in math the left hand side of = is always a variable name = means that the result of the right expression gets stored in the variable some languages use <- instead of = to be clearer to make matters worse, there is a test to see if two expressions are equal, and in Python its
What you should remember
Computer science is cool and useful Imperative knowledge Computers are dumb and just follow steps Variables & assignment = means that the variable on the left stores a new value

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6.

00: Introduction to Computer Science & Programming

Stu I do with computers

Armando Solar-Lezama - Programming tools/languages - Program synthesis

Frdo Durand - Computer graphics - Computational photography

Dont get scared by keywords and details

We will use plagiarism detection software - MOSS: http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/

Slightly dierent from past 6.00

Problems Computer Science can solve

Well cover a simple version

Slide by Manolis Kellis

Organize data, communicate

Fluids, weather, structure, n-body, virus spread

Well cover a simple version

Natural language processing, speech

Play chess, play jeopardy

3D reconstruction, face detection

Problems one Programmer can solve

Psets from last year

Keep track of workout

For the MIT frisbee team By Patricia Li, Physics major

Monty Hall probability paradox

N photos=> auto correspondence and layout About 3 months of 25%-time coding

N photos=> auto correspondence and layout About 3 months of 25%-time coding

I wanted to create a handwritten video lecture Online Sub No good tool

Non-Sequential Authoring I wrote my own software, Pentimento of

(a) User records temporal lecture,

(b) retroactively edits layout,

From 6.815 (also in Python!)

HDR Panorama stitching Painterly lter Seamless pasting Morphing ...

What problems would you solve?

What you should remember

For your culture: Syracuse problem

Conjecture: always converges to 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture

Declarative vs. imperative knowledge

Declarative: - statement of fact Imperative: - how-to recipe - also known as procedural

is the number so that the area of a circle or radius r is r2

Other example: Square root

Declarative: - square root of N is the number x such that 2 x =N

See 6.00x or the book for more

Recap: What computers do

Python & Idle

Editor - to edit and rene longer pieces of code

Expressions Variables - Name - Value - Very different from math unknowns!

Assignment using = - Change the v

What you should remember

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