Information and Computation

This afternoon, we dealt with the concept of "information." Of course, they had an informal idea of what information is, but had never really thought about it carefully. And when confronted with the question of "What is information?" it was not so easy for them to provide a definitive answer. This is not unusual, as Shannon, the father of information theory, thought about this a lot before developing the theory. We discussed Shannon's development of his ideas, some of the basic results, and how they relate to computation.

We then began dealing with the concept of "computation." We've already been talking about the abstract concept of Turing machines (and of course, they are using real computers in the lab), but I wanted to begin their introduction to real computers by discussing analog vs. digital computation. So, out came the slide rules and abacuses. We discussed how to do some basic calculations with the slide rule. Each student was given a slide rule, and "oooh's" and "aaah's" were uttered when they succeeded in doing their first multiplication. Yes, the slide rule really does work, and it seems like magic! Of course, it's not magic, and the mystery of why slide rules work will be dealt with next time, after which we'll go on to the abacus. I'll be interested to see who will be the first to be able to articulate why slide rules are analog and abacuses are digital.

All in all, I think it was a good afternoon. They seem motivated to learn, but we are throwing so much at them that overload is always an issue. My afternoon session with them was only one of three learning sessions they had today (a lecture this morning on dark matter by a UCSD physicist, and then Lara's scientific communications class), never mind the other sessions throughout the week. Well, at least they're getting a taste of what college life will be like, and hopefully they will learn how to manage their time so they benefit from each learning opportunity as much as possible.