Winter Semester 2024/2025

Summary

This class is a first introduction to Computer Science.

Supplementary Reading

Grading

  • Weekly exercise assignments are not to be turned in and graded in this class. However, you are strongly encouraged to work on them before they are discussed in the exercise session on Wednesday
  • The grade for this class is determined by one final exam
  • There will be a “mock exam” 3-4 weeks before the final exam. Passing the mock exam will add a grade bonus of 1/3 of a grade step to your final grade. Note that the pass/fail decision is not affected by the bonus, and the top grade can be achieved without the bonus.

Topics

Oct 16, 2024

Introduction, Boolean algebra (see notes, Wikipedia article on Boolean algebra)

Oct 22, 2024

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 1 - solutions; binary logic and logic gates (see notes)

Oct 23, 2024

No class due to conflicting admin meeting

Oct 29, 2024

Example for circuit simplification; flip-flop (see animation of RS flip-flop); Integer representations, two’s complement, positional number systems (see notes)

Oct 30, 2024

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 2 - solutions; positional number systems (ctd., see notes)

Nov 5, 2024

Floating point arithmetic (notes, see the floating-point converter for a nice illustration of the bit format; more background can be found in the Wikipedia article on floating point arithmetic and, far more advanced, the paper by Goldberg titled What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic)

Nov 6, 2024

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 3 - solutions; floating point arithmetic (ctd.)

Nov 12, 2024

Character strings; from ASCII to Unicode (for background reading, see Wikipedia article on Unicode, discussion of C vs. Pascal strings on Stack Overflow), short video on UTF-8

Nov 13, 2024

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 4 - solutions; character strings (ctd.)

Nov 19, 2024

Finite state machines (begin, see notes, slides from Uni Tübingen, introductory video)

Nov 20, 2024

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 5 - solutions; regular expressions; further background reading: Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast); Conversion from non-deterministic to deterministic FSMs; conversion from regular expressions to FSMs and back

Nov 26, 2024

Beyond regular languages (notes; for background reading, see Chomsky hierarchy, Turing machine and a nice elementary discussion with a bit more details than covered in the book by Forouzan, Chapter 17.

Nov 27, 2024

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 6 - solutions; the halting problem

Dec 3, 2024

Computer architectures: Informal discussion of Moore’s law, Dennard scaling, and von Neumann architecture; also see this set of slides by S. Swanson et al. and this set of slides by C. Baun

Dec 4, 2024

No class due to conflicting admin meeting, please watch the video from the 2017 Turing award lecture and/or read the edited transcript

Dec 10, 2024

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 7 - solutions; Operating systems (begin): Memory management, process scheduling, concurrency (notes; Forouzan, Chapter 7)

Dec 11, 2024:

Dining philosophers problem (see Wikipedia; for background reading, see the original Chandy/Misra paper, the Dijkstra/Tannenbaum solution - not covered in class - can be found in more readable pseudocode here)

Dec 17, 2024:

File systems: mounting, soft links vs. hard links, network file systems (brief mention), RAID (see class notes)

Dec 18, 2024:

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 8 - solutions; file systems (ctd.)

Jan 7, 2025:

Error detection and correction: Parity, Checksums, Hamming codes (see class notes; also see this online Hamming code calculator; background video on cyclic checksums which explains the concept in more detail than covered in class)

Jan 8, 2025:

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 9 - solutions; error detection and correction (ctd.)

Jan 14, 2025:

Error detection and correction (ctd.); computer networks (For background reading, see Forouzan, Chapter 6 or this slide stack from FRA-UAS)

Jan 15, 2025:

Discussion of Exercise Sheet 10 - solutions; Routing algorithms: link state routing (see class notes)

Jan 21, 2025:

TBA

Jan 22, 2025:

TBA

Jan 28, 2025:

TBA

Jan 29, 2025:

Mock Exam, in class

Feb 4, 2025:

TBA

Feb 5, 2025:

TBA

Feb 12, 2024:

Final Exam, 12:00-14:00, HB-GH