Open course ware

PATRICK WINSTON: The Uniform Code of Military Justice specifies court martial for any officer who sends a soldier into battle without a weapon. There ought to be a similar protection for students because students shouldn't go out into life without the ability to communicate, and that's because your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas, in that order. I know that I can be successful in this because the quality of communication, your speaking, your writing, is largely determined by this formula. It's a matter of how much knowledge you have, how much you practice with that knowledge, and your inherent talent, and notice that the T is very small. What really matters is what you know. This point came to me suddenly a few decades ago when I was skiing at Sun Valley. I had heard that it was Celebrity Weekend, and one of the celebrities was Mary Lou Retton, famous Olympic gymnast, per...

PATRICK WINSTON: You know, it's unfortunate that politics has become so serious. Back when you were little it was a lot more fun. You could make fun of politicians. Here's a politician some of you may recognize. But it's convenient to be able to vary what this particular politician looks like. For example, we can go from a cookie baker to radical. [LAUGHTER] PATRICK WINSTON: We can go from superwoman to bimbo. [LAUGHTER] PATRICK WINSTON: Socialite-- I put socialite into this. There she is. Or we can move the slider over the other way to bag lady. Alert, asleep, sad, happy. How does that work? I don't know. But I bet by the end of this hour you'll know how that works. And not only that, you'll understand something about what it takes to recognize faces. It turns out to some theories of face recognition are based on the same principles that this program is based on. But you can kind of guess what's happening here. There are many stored images and...

PATRICK WINSTON: It's too bad, in a way, that we can't paint everything black, because this map coloring problem sure would be a lot easier. So I don't know what we're going to do about that. How long is this going to take? Here's what we're going to do. We're going to wait till either all the laptops are closed, or this program terminates, whichever comes first. So how long is this going to take? I actually don't know. I think it'll take more than the life time of the universe, but I'm not sure. So let's take a look at a slightly easier map coloring problem. We'll stop this one and change the map to something I call [? simplicia. ?] There's 26 states, one for each letter in the alphabet. And what we're going to do is we're going to do a depth first search for a suitable coloring of this map. We're going to go in order, A, B, C, D, E. And as I've suggested here, at each level we're going to rotate the...