DHCS Seminar Classmates,
It is my great pleasure to announce the readings for next week's KR seminar
meeting on algorithms, data structures, programming, and other issues relating
to matters computational. They are:
1. "A Century of Controversy over the Foundations of Mathematics"
This is G.J. Chaitin's March 2000 Distinguished Lecture at Carnegie Mellon
University School of Computer Science. It's more than usually chatty (even for
a speech), but it's one of the clearest explications of the subject
I've come across.
Available on the web at
http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/cmu.html
2. "Basic Concepts" from *The Art of Computer Programming* by Donald Knuth
The preface to what is arguably the most famous book ever written on the
subject of algorithms and data structures. Contains Knuth's explanation of
what an algorithm is.
3. "Models of Reasoning" from *Philosophy and Computer Science* by Timothy
Colburn
Some philosophizing on the nature of reasoning in a computational context.
4. "Beyond Leibniz's Dream" from *The Universal Computer* by Martin Davis
This epilogue to Davis's book is a response to some interesting statements by
the philosopher John Searle on the subject of what computers can and cannot do.
All readings except for the first are available in PDF format at our Toolkit
home page:
http://toolkit.virginia.edu/cgi-local/tk/UVa_UNKN_2001_Fall_UNKN25-1/displaymaterials/
I look forward to our discussion!
Steve
-- Stephen Ramsay Senior Programmer Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities Alderman Library, University of Virginia phone: (434) 924-6011 email: sjr3a@virginia.edu web: http://busa.village.virginia.edu/"By ratiocination, I mean computation" -- Hobbes
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