Computer Science Exam

Just so y’all know that you did­n’t do ALL of my exam study work for me…

CS1002/01 — Final Exam­i­na­tion — Sum­mer, 2003

1. What was the most impor­tant thing you learned in this class?
That I had absolute­ly no idea what “com­put­er sci­ence” tru­ly meant. I have a fair amount of IT expe­ri­ence, but no CS expe­ri­ence at all.

2. Who was John von Neu­mann and why was he impor­tant in the devel­op­ment of computing?
He was a math­e­mati­cian and physi­cist who was born in Hun­gary and emi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States. He is cred­it­ed with the stored pro­gram con­cept and the log­i­cal com­put­er design (von Neu­mann machine mod­el) that is used in all com­put­ers today.

3. Give a brief def­i­n­i­tion of the type of AI known as an “expert system”.
Expert sys­tems are designed to repro­duce the prob­lem-solv­ing behav­ior of an expert in a par­tic­u­lar, nar­row­ly-defined field. They store infor­ma­tion orga­nized by rules gleaned from those experts.

5. How should you eval­u­ate infor­ma­tion found via a search engine? Why?
The results should be care­ful­ly eval­u­at­ed based on the cred­i­bil­i­ty of sources, dates, and rel­e­vance to your top­ic. Check­ing mul­ti­ple sources is high­ly rec­om­mend­ed, and it is often wise to check snopes.com and sim­i­lar sites if the infor­ma­tion seems out­ra­geous in any way.

6. List and define the three lev­els of for­mal meth­ods in soft­ware engineering.
Infor­mal — no con­straint on the mod­el you develop
Semi-for­mal — well-defined syn­tax (pseudocode)
For­mal — rig­or­ous­ly defined (with math) syn­tax and semantics

8. Give two exam­ples of dif­fer­ences between “big AI” and “small AI”.
Big AI — large scale, gen­er­al, hard to do, advances gen­er­al knowledge—for instance, rec­og­niz­ing spo­ken Eng­lish from any­one say­ing anything
Small AI — small scale, spe­cif­ic, eas­i­er to do, may not advance gen­er­al knowledge—for instance, rec­og­niz­ing one per­son say­ing a few words

9. Does Michie’s match­book com­put­er exhib­it intel­li­gent behav­ior? Does it learn? How can you do one with­out the other?
It does not tru­ly “learn” or exhib­it intel­li­gent behav­ior, but it does improve its algo­rithms over time. It can­not exhib­it spon­ta­neous behav­ior to solve a prob­lem, nor does it have any cog­ni­tive capa­bil­i­ty. It can­not cre­ate any­thing new. It does not per­ceive any rela­tion­ships but is pro­grammed to always select the move (box) con­tain­ing the most beads. That is a sim­ple cal­cu­la­tion. Stor­ing infor­ma­tion is not the same as learn­ing, as the infor­ma­tion does not nec­es­sar­i­ly have any relevance—witness how many chil­dren learn to rat­tle off mul­ti­pli­ca­tion tables by rote but are not able to actu­al­ly DO mul­ti­pli­ca­tion correctly.

10. Why should you learn how to ana­lyze algorithms?
Fail­ure to ana­lyze algo­rithms and use the best method for the task at hand results in wast­ed resources. The most mem­o­rable exam­ple giv­en involved a process that would take eight months using the most obvi­ous algo­rithm and about one hour using anoth­er one.

13. What are the three kinds of things you can say to a com­put­er in a program?
‑sequences of direct instruc­tions (assign­ment, I/O)
‑selec­tion rules to decide what to do next (if case)
‑iter­a­tion of a group of instruc­tions (for, while)

14. Describe and illus­trate with a dia­gram the “fetch-inter­pret-exe­cute” cycle of a stan­dard computer.
Stored pro­grams are run by fetch­ing the instruc­tion, inter­pret­ing or decod­ing it, then exe­cut­ing it, and repeat­ing that cycle.

(I can’t real­ly put in what I drew, but it was very simple.)

Cur­rent Mood: accomplished
Cyn is Rick's wife, Katie's Mom, and Esther & Oliver's Mémé. She's also a professional geek, avid reader, fledgling coder, enthusiastic gamer (TTRPGs), occasional singer, and devoted stitcher.
Posts created 4255

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Related Posts

Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel.

Back To Top