The lecture was about analog computation. The spaghetti demonstrates sorting. The prof broke noodles into various lengths and then announced he would sort them by length. He gathered them all in his hand, stamped them on the table so their bottoms all had the same position, and then moved his hand down from above until encountering a noodle, pulled it out, and laid it on the table as the largest one.
The rope represented a graph with nodes at knots and string as edges. To find the shortest path between two nodes, take one in each hand and pull -- the shortest path is the taut straight line.
He then drilled a bunch of screws into the board. The algorithm for convex hull is as follows: tie a rope to the bottom-most screw. Then hold the rope to the side and take it around the board widdershins. It will wrap on each point on the edge of the convex hull.
The Trivial Pursuit (or maybe it was some other game) was to illustrate an error some students were making in homework answers. He demonstrated an exponential-time sorting algorithm by scattering them all on the table and then looking through each card for each other that gets picked up. He told us not to take notes on that part, because we'd look back and see a statement like "Sorting takes exponential time."
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2004-04-30 03:15 pm (UTC)The rope represented a graph with nodes at knots and string as edges. To find the shortest path between two nodes, take one in each hand and pull -- the shortest path is the taut straight line.
He then drilled a bunch of screws into the board. The algorithm for convex hull is as follows: tie a rope to the bottom-most screw. Then hold the rope to the side and take it around the board widdershins. It will wrap on each point on the edge of the convex hull.
The Trivial Pursuit (or maybe it was some other game) was to illustrate an error some students were making in homework answers. He demonstrated an exponential-time sorting algorithm by scattering them all on the table and then looking through each card for each other that gets picked up. He told us not to take notes on that part, because we'd look back and see a statement like "Sorting takes exponential time."