Open course ware

OPERATOR: The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. You're support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare course at ocw.mit.edu. PROFESSOR: All right. Today's lecture, mostly I want to talk about what computer scientists do. We've sort of been teaching you computer science in the small, I want to pull back and think in the large about, what do people do once they learn about computer science? And then I'll wrap up with a quick overview of what I think we've accomplished this term. So what does a computer scientist do? What they really do is, almost everything. Graduates of our department, other departments, have done things like animation for movies you've all seen, they keep airplanes from falling out of the sky, they help surgeons do a better job of brain surgery, tha...

OPERATOR: The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. To make a donation, or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. PROFESSOR: So you may recall that, in the last lecture, we more or less solved the drunken student problem, looking at a random walk. I now want to move on and discuss some variants of the random walk problem that are collectively known as biased random walks. So the notion here is, the walk is still stochastic but there is some bias in the direction, so the movements are not uniformly distributed or equally distributed in all directions. As I go through this, I want you to sort of, think in advance about what the take-home message should be. One, and this is probably the most important part for today, is I want to illustrate how by designing our programs in a nice way aroun...

OPERATOR: The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. To make a donation, or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. PROFESSOR: OK, we're now, kind of on the home stretch, and we're entering the part of the course, that's actually my favorite part of the course. I can't promise it will be your favorite part of the course, but I hope so, at least for many of you. Throughout the term, we've been talking about ways to solve problems using computation. And one of the key lessons that I hope you're beginning to absorb is that we might use a completely different way to solve a problem with the computer than we would have used if we didn't have a computer handy. In particular, we might often use brute force, which you've never use with a pencil and paper, we might ...

OPERATOR: The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high quality educational resources for free. To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. PROFESSOR: Last lecture we were talking about classes, and object-oriented programming, and we're going to come back to it today. I'm going to remind you, we were talking about it because we suggested it is a really powerful way of structuring systems, and that's really why we want to use it, It's a very common way of structuring systems. So today I'm going to pick up on a bunch of more nuanced, or more complex if you like, ways of leveraging the power of classes. But we're going to see a bunch of examples that are going to give us a sense. I'm going to talk about inheritance, we're going to talk about shadowing, we're going to talk about i...