Jan 19
intro class
Nuts'n'bolts - course website, expectations, grading ... anyone not had a course with me before?
What the subject is :
- "information entropy"
- randomness - what is it, really? how can you tell?
- compression
- lossless : huffman, LZW, arithmetic
- lossy : discret cosine (i.e. JPG), etc
- error correction
- noise
- how much redundancy is needed?
- "distance" between messages
- crypto
- symmetric encryption
- asymmetric public key methods
- decryption attacks
Why it matters :
- a foundation idea in CS
- ... and fundamental physics (!)
Approach will be :
- fairly mathematical (some formal, some by example) though not focusing on proofs
- lots of computational examples (i.e. "write a program to ...")
- using (I hope) many sources
The first assignment is posted, due next Thursday. Start early, find me and/or email me with questions.
The full "no holds barred" version of this course is usually at the graduate level; we'll see how deep we get.
