POTS

Ryan Chen

2/22/17

POTS

The book pattern on the stones I think was an interesting book. You learn a lot of stuff you didn’t know much about computers. There are a lot of difficult words and information they throw at you in the book which when you read it sometimes it doesn’t make sense. You would have to google some words to know the definition before you can understand what they’re talking about. It was easy to understand when they tell us how they program a computer to make the best move possible every move you make so it’s like the computer is programmed to win. When they talk about Invert, And, and or blocks that was when it got confusing. The algorithm chapter was kind of confusing but when the professor explained it in class I had a better understanding.

The most interesting thing I learned from the book is probably some of the problems you think a computer can solve can’t actually solve it. Like the traveling salesman problem trying to find the shortest route possible. It was also interesting when the book talked about how a computer uses 1s and 0s to created other numbers or letters. I liked how the books gives a story of an example at the beginning of every chapter like pairing up socks in (Chapter 5) because those were the things I understand in the book the most. It was also interesting when the book talked about storing memory and how they try to compress the most common word or letter to take up less memory in (P.93-94).

The parts I don’t like about the book is in almost every reading we do there’s always information we read that’s confusing or words that we know nothing about like the hierarchy. There’s a lot of information as you read the book and you really have to slow down and process the information or look up words and try to understand it throughout the reading. It’s not a book where you can read the entire book then write a lot about because it’s a lot of information to how a computer works and you might have to go back through the book to jog some memory.

There were many things I looked up on google because I didn’t understand the concepts. One for example I googled what pseudorandom is when they used it on (P.71) when they were explaining quantum computing. According to (Google) pseudorandom is (of a number, a sequence of numbers, or any digital data) satisfying one or more statistical tests for randomness but produced by a definite mathematical procedure. So basically it’s a number that appears to be random but it’s not. The numbers are generated by a sequence so they appear statistically.

The book gave me a good understanding about computers. I didn’t really have any questions going into this book except just reading it to see what it’s about. It explain about how data gets stored and how expensive it was back then for memory on a computer when today we might use a bunch of memory on our phone and not think about any of this since iphone changed it’s lowest gigs to 32gb.

For me since this is the first book about computers I’ve read I would recommend it to a friend. But it takes a while for you to process the bunch of information they give you as you read the book and there might be multiple things you need to look up in order for you to understand the reading.

This book is significant because it’s the basics and the history of how computers work and they break everything down. I think the book was chosen in this class was because the lectures in class had to do with the book. Every chapter I read before class the next day I go to lecture the teacher basically explains what we read. I didn’t understand the reading much sometimes then the next day I see the professor go through it in class it kind of made sense because I read about it before class. It’s good this book was chosen as the textbook so you’re not clueless during lectures as the professor is going through slides.