Meanwhile over in the mechanical engineering department, someone is complaining that they have to learn physics when they just wanted to build cool cars.
I took engineering for a year before I realized it had nothing to do with trains.
☠️
After you draw your 100th free body diagram a car pops out
It’s not math class; it’s deriver’s ed.
4 years later: “this button is the wrong color. fix it ASAP”
This hurts so much because it’s my life :(
A few failed exams later you end up programming cyberpunk and since you’re so oblivious to algorithms’ complexity it becomes a meme not a game.
But it’s ok because now Nvidia has to deal with your garbage code due to Cyberpunk being the only game that supports the latest graphics tech.
… and then you program games and you do the least performant bogosort you can ever think of
But you can make games that much more interesting if your algorithms are on point.
Otherwise it’s all “well I don’t know why it generated map that’s insane”. Or “well AI has this weird bug but I don’t understand where it’s coming from”.
I did games technology at university. We had a module that was just playing board games and eventually making one. Also did an unreal engine module that ended with making a game and a cinematic.
It was awesome.
Abstruse Goose!! 🖤
Sipser is an absolute banger of a book though.
Sipser?
“Introduction to the Theory of Computation” by Michael Sipser, a book commonly referred to as simply “Sipser”. My ToC course in uni was based around that book and while I didn’t read the whole thing I enjoyed it a ton.
“Introduction to the Theory of Computation” by Michael Sipser, a book commonly referred to as simply “Sipser”. My ToC course in uni was based around that book and while I didn’t read the whole thing I enjoyed it a ton.
I read it cover-to-cover like fifteen years ago. I’ve lost most of that knowledge since I haven’t touched it in so long, but I remember I really enjoyed it.
…then don’t study computer science. I study CS and it’s annoying when someone in a more math/logic oriented course is like “If I get a job at a tech company I won’t need this”. All that IS computer science, if you just wanna code, learn to code.
I would have done CS if every math class at my school didn’t have 500 people in it. Even college algebra. They basically made everything a weed-out class
I do think many of the CS concepts are pretty cool :)
The problem is a lot of people who want to learn to code, and are conditioned to desire the college route of education, don’t actually know that there is a difference and that you can be completely self-taught in the field without ever stepping foot in a university.
We’re not closing schools despite having libraries and the internet, having (good) teachers is useful to learn faster and get pushed further. There are some good programming schools that can make it more efficient for you. I think the main problem is rather the insane cost of higher education in the USA which create anxiety about being certain that you can repay it in the future it may open for you. It is sad.
Can you get well paying coding jobs with upward mobility without at least a BA in CS?
Maybe not what you’re asking but people with a non-CS M.Sc or PhD commonly switch to coding, especially in the data fields.
My favorite subject at engineering school !
My favorite subject!
Since when were Turing machines ever nondeterministic?
Wait till you hear about oracle machines. They can solve any problem, even the halting problem.
(It’s just another mathematical construct that you can do cool things with to prove certain things)
If you augment a TM with nondeterminism, it can still be reduced to a deterministic TM.
Nondeterministic turing machines are the same kind of impossible theoretical automaton as an NFA. They can theoretically solve NP problems.
It’s been a long long time since I touched this but I’m still almost positive deterministic machines can solve everything in NP already.
They exist in the same grammatical hierarchy so theoretically they can solve the same problems. What I should have said was that nondeterministic turing machines can solve NP problems in P
I wonder how many in that class will ever need to think about multitape Turing machines ever again.
The point of these lectures is mostly not to teach how to work with Turing machines, it is to understand the theoretical limits of computers. The Turing machine is just a simple to describe and well-studied tool used to explore that.
For example, are there things there that cannot be computed on a computer, no matter for how long it computes? What about if the computer is able to make guesses along the way, can it compute more? Because of this comic, no — it would only be a lot faster.
Arguably, many programmers can do their job even without knowing any of that. But it certainly helps with seeing the big picture.
