For a list of possible projects, click here.
You can download the course syllabus here.
Special information meant only for students in the class can be accessed here. (Provided that you have the password.)
This is a tentative schedule for the class. I may change it depending on how the class progresses.
| Week | Topic | Readings | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jan. 16 | Welcome! | — |
| 2 | Jan. 23 | Development | Catmull & Wallace (2014) and Brooks (1975) |
| 3 | Jan. 30 | Ancient Computation | Wikipedia Jacquard Machine, Knuth (1972), Mehri (2017) |
| 4 | Feb. 6 | The Analytical Engine | Menabrea & Lovelace (1842) (focus on Note A) |
| 5 | Feb. 13 | LaTeX & résumé building | The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2E |
| 6 | Feb. 20 | Turing & Turing machines | Wikipedia Turing Machines, Wikipedia Entscheidungsproblem, and Smith (2021) |
| 7 | Feb. 27 | Word War II cryptanalysis | Gladwin (1997) and Sale (2004) (focus on Gladwin) |
| 8 | March 6 | Midterm in-class presentations | — |
| Spring Break! | |||
| 9 | March 20 | High-level languages | Hopper (1952), Dijkstra (1968), and Wulf & Shaw (1973) |
| 10 | March 27 | Early modern hardware | Levis (2004) and Burks, Goldstine & von Neumann (1947) |
| 11 | April 3 | Early AI | Turing (1950) | -
| 12 | April 10 | Ethics | Leveson (1995) and Lubin (2016) |
| 13 | April 17 | The Internet | Baran (2002) and Berners-Lee (1989) |
| 14 | April 24 | The Personal Computer | Evans, Buckland & Lefer (2006) and Gladwell (2011) | -->
| 15 | May 1 | The Future of AI | Vinge (1993) and Klein (2023) |
| Final Reports Due on May 12th! | |||