Meanwhile over in the mechanical engineering department, someone is complaining that they have to learn physics when they just wanted to build cool cars.
After you draw your 100th free body diagram a car pops out
It’s not math class; it’s deriver’s ed.
I took engineering for a year before I realized it had nothing to do with trains.
4 years later: “this button is the wrong color. fix it ASAP”
This hurts so much because it’s my life :(
I was interviewed with complex logic problems and a rigorous testing of my domain knowledge.
Most of what I do is updating copy and images.
A few failed exams later you end up programming cyberpunk and since you’re so oblivious to algorithms’ complexity it becomes a meme not a game.
I wonder how many in that class will ever need to think about multitape Turing machines ever again.
I didn’t go to university, because I wanted to learn useful stuff, but because I’m curiousity driven. There is so much cool stuff and it’s very cool to learn it. That’s the point of university that it prepares you for a scientific career where the ultimate goal is knowledge not profit maximisation (super idealistically).
Talking about Turing Machines it’s such a fun concept. People use this to build computers out of everything - like really - it became a Sport by this point. When the last Zelda was Released the first question for many was, if they can build a computer inside it.
Does it serve a practical purpose? At the end of the day 99% of the time the answer will be no, we have computing machines built from transistors that are the fastest we know of, lets just use these.
But 1% of the time people recognize something useful… hey we now found out in principle one can build computers from quantum particles… we found an algorithm that could beat classical computers in a certain task… we found a way to actually do this in reality, but it’s more proof of concept (15 = 5×3)… and so on
Ram is literally just the tape. Modern computers are just multitape turing machines, albeit the tape ends at some point.
Technically a multitape Turing machine is a Turing machine.
The point of these lectures is mostly not to teach how to work with Turing machines, it is to understand the theoretical limits of computers. The Turing machine is just a simple to describe and well-studied tool used to explore that.
For example, are there things there that cannot be computed on a computer, no matter for how long it computes? What about if the computer is able to make guesses along the way, can it compute more? Because of this comic, no — it would only be a lot faster.
Arguably, many programmers can do their job even without knowing any of that. But it certainly helps with seeing the big picture.
Only the ones who don’t grow up to be total code monkeys
… and then you program games and you do the least performant bogosort you can ever think of
But you can make games that much more interesting if your algorithms are on point.
Otherwise it’s all “well I don’t know why it generated map that’s insane”. Or “well AI has this weird bug but I don’t understand where it’s coming from”.
I did games technology at university. We had a module that was just playing board games and eventually making one. Also did an unreal engine module that ended with making a game and a cinematic.
It was awesome.
Abstruse Goose!! 🖤
I’m grateful to this strip because reading it caused me to learn the correct spelling of “abstruse”. I’ve never heard anyone say the word, and for some reason I had always read it as “abtruse”, without the first S.
Sipser is an absolute banger of a book though.
Sipser?
“Introduction to the Theory of Computation” by Michael Sipser, a book commonly referred to as simply “Sipser”. My ToC course in uni was based around that book and while I didn’t read the whole thing I enjoyed it a ton.
“Introduction to the Theory of Computation” by Michael Sipser, a book commonly referred to as simply “Sipser”. My ToC course in uni was based around that book and while I didn’t read the whole thing I enjoyed it a ton.
I read it cover-to-cover like fifteen years ago. I’ve lost most of that knowledge since I haven’t touched it in so long, but I remember I really enjoyed it.
…then don’t study computer science. I study CS and it’s annoying when someone in a more math/logic oriented course is like “If I get a job at a tech company I won’t need this”. All that IS computer science, if you just wanna code, learn to code.
The problem is a lot of people who want to learn to code, and are conditioned to desire the college route of education, don’t actually know that there is a difference and that you can be completely self-taught in the field without ever stepping foot in a university.
We’re not closing schools despite having libraries and the internet, having (good) teachers is useful to learn faster and get pushed further. There are some good programming schools that can make it more efficient for you. I think the main problem is rather the insane cost of higher education in the USA which create anxiety about being certain that you can repay it in the future it may open for you. It is sad.
I would have done CS if every math class at my school didn’t have 500 people in it. Even college algebra. They basically made everything a weed-out class
I do think many of the CS concepts are pretty cool :)
Can you get well paying coding jobs with upward mobility without at least a BA in CS?
It’s harder to break into but I make 150k and barely graduated high school. Software engineering is largely a field that doesn’t care about degrees but about ability. It’s harder these days to break into the field than it was 10 years ago when I did but it’s absolutely still possible
I have a fine arts degree and I’m a lead dev 🤷♂️
Maybe not what you’re asking but people with a non-CS M.Sc or PhD commonly switch to coding, especially in the data fields.
My favorite subject at engineering school !
Since when were Turing machines ever nondeterministic?
Wait till you hear about oracle machines. They can solve any problem, even the halting problem.
(It’s just another mathematical construct that you can do cool things with to prove certain things)
If you augment a TM with nondeterminism, it can still be reduced to a deterministic TM.
Nondeterministic turing machines are the same kind of impossible theoretical automaton as an NFA. They can theoretically solve NP problems.
It’s been a long long time since I touched this but I’m still almost positive deterministic machines can solve everything in NP already.
They exist in the same grammatical hierarchy so theoretically they can solve the same problems. What I should have said was that nondeterministic turing machines can solve NP problems in P
My favorite subject!
