Instructor: Chris Stephenson  email 

phone:(212) 311 54 15   room: D 144

Assistant: Öykü Alanbay  email  

phone:(212) 311 54 58   room: D 127

This course is not about “how to use a computer”, but what computation and computers mean. The object of the course is to give the student a general cultural background that will allow a non-technical person to understand the more significant intellectual and social problems associated with computer science. History of computers and computer science -Pascal, Babbage, Church, Turing, ... Models of computation – an overview of the Turing machine and of the lambda calculus. A layperson's view of Gödel's theorem and Turing's proof of the incomputability of the halting problem. The combinatorial explosion. Difficult computations. Kinds of computer program -imperative, object oriented, functional, declarative, pattern matching. Computation in everyday computer use. Wildcards, pattern matching, regular expressions. Spreadsheet as a primitive functional program. How software is made -compilation, interpretation. Computers and society. Intellectual property, Free Software, Security, Privacy, Sharing. Computer crime, hacking and cracking. Social responsibility -computers and the work process, computers and unemployment. The birth of the internet. The birth of the world wide web. Standards and monopolization that involves a discussion covering: comparison of software development practices(closed src vs. public licences), what to look for when evaluating and employing software solutions, common organization structure of software distributions, how to explore, compile and run software. The course will be accompanied by a series of lab exercises and miniprojects. In some of these, students will be exposed to writing small and simple programs in different possible styles. In others students will be asked to conduct research tasks on the internet.

Credits: 3

Restrictions: COMP 111 or COMP 112