What is a computer and what is one good for?
 -How do we boss them around?
 -Should we boss them around?

Today we spent most of class introducing ourselves and going over the
syllabus at:

http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~cs190000

In addition to our textbooks we will rely on online articles,
tutorials, and custom notes prepared by me.  I also encourage you
to find electronic resources on your own to supplement material we're
covering.

You can find the course schedule and assignments above.  We will not
officially use learnlink, but I will monitor the conference every now and
then.

I dicussed different kinds of computers and embedded systems including
personal computers, mobile devices, appliances, electronics, video games,
biomedical devices, ...

We also briefly discussed human intelligence vs computer intellingence, and
the fact that there are lots of useful problems that are hard for one to solve
but easy for the other.  We talked about captchas (which came up in the context
of my e-mail address on the course page).

Activity: come up with tasks easy for one but not the other.  Are problems
that are easy for humans but not computer useful?

Next we demoed the Lego NXT robotics kit we will be using with a robot that plays
catch.

Finally we grouped ourselves into pairs and completed an exercise where one person
"programmed" the other person to perform a particular task.  The programmer's job
was to give a precise set of directions to perform a taks.  The interpreter's job
was to thwart the programmer's effort by exposing imprecision in the set of directions.

We found that it was tough to specify exact distances due to variance in step size
and gait.

---
Assignment for Tue. 09/01:

(1) Read the articles on flowcharts at:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowchart
  (Does the "N!" example at the bottom make sense?  It's cool if not.)

  http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_97.htm


(2) Design a flowchart describing the "program" you follow to get from
    home to your first class.  Typically this is just something you do
    without much thought, so part of the exercise is in precisely
    distilling your thoughts.

      Make sure someone who's not from around here (an alien, someone
    from the ancient past, ...) can follow your directions to get to
    class safely (i.e. without getting killed).  This means you'll
    have to take into account contingencies like handling traffic
    (whether you're worried about hitting someone or being hit).  Of
    course we could fill pages taking every minute detail into
    account, so pick the details you think are most important, and aim
    for a flowchart with about 15-20 steps or symbols.

(3) Watch the "NXT Introduction" tutorial at:

  http://www.ortop.org/NXT_Tutorial/html/essentials.html