Hahahah, I just discovered Harvard CS50 at this link. OMG… what a difference in style compared with the MIT course.
I feel both MIT and Harvard have strengths in so that they are both SO different. This I feel is enough reason to take both. I feel that taking both introduction to Computer Science courses will help me analyze similar problems from different angles, and if I am gonna go on my own… then I’d better have a rock solid foundation.
So from today onwards I will also follow Harvard CS50
I feel this is… in a way… a rest for me. A way to be part of Undergrad at some universities I have not had chance to study a full undergrad, but that I would have loved to!
Lecture 1
I am pretty impressed by the speed of the lecture… it’s so quick! Already done binary numbers, ASCII, RGB (red, green, blue)… interesting that you can say… hey give me 72 red, 73 green, 33 blue…
In different situations, exact same patterns of 0 and 1’s can mean different things (Characters, colors, sounds…).
Absolutely beautiful explanation of a search algorythm. How many steps does it take me to go through a phonebook to find a name. First is searching one by one, second is going steps of 2 by 2, third is taking half, selecting right half and keep halving… The interesting thing is how to represent the increment of difficulty of the problem as n (size goes up). And how is the third method represented?
The key is to think, how many more steps will I need to take if I double my problem size? On first case, you need to take n more steps. On second case n/2. On third case… just 1 ! And even if sample gets doubled many times until it becomes massively large… still you won’t need to take many steps to reach the answer.
EXTRA
At some point in the lecture he mentions that we will do cryptography! And the message below appears on the screen.
When I looked at it it was obvious to me that it was a web address starting by https. So uggct translates to https. After checking the ASCII codes of those letters, I can see that each letter translates to the correct one when you go to 13 letters further from the letter you are, and if you run out of letters you need to start counting again from the beginning.
By doing that we get: https://youtu.be/ (HERE NOT SURE)
So clearly that is a link to a video! However I have not been able to translate the same method for the rest of the URL. Not sure what I am doing wrong. Hope that I will be able to solve it in the future.
Best.
