Week 1 Homework

Remember: all homework is to be emailed to our grader, Brad Pitcher at brad@cs.uoregon.edu

Brad's preference is to get one email from you with a subject line of "Week 1 homework" and a complete set of attachments for each problem. If you have problems with this, he will take multiple emails, but make sure you identify what you are sending, e.g., "week 1 reading 1", etc.

If your email account is something like "reallycoolsurfer@gmail.com", make sure Brad can figure out who it is from: there are so many really cool surfers out there.

My suggested order is to tackle the reading problems first then the debate. The circuit problems can be done first or last. Circuit problems, in general, should be done in sequence given: one problem might build on work from previous problem.

You can answer all the textbook and debate questions in a single file, e.g., a single Word document. Easiest is to copy and paste the questions below into your text-processing tool, then provide answers below each question. When you are done, save to a file and then send it to Brad as attachment.

Homework Problems From Textbook Reading

These questions are taken from chapter 1, your reading this week. The author makes a lot of very provocative statements in this chapter. We will get back to them later in the quarter.

There are some words the author uses throughout the book that I want to make sure you know. Please don't just copy definitions out of the book. If you want to remember it, paraphrase or summarize.

1. What is "the singularity"? The author mentions this several places in the chapter. Read through once before summarizing his defintion(s).

2. What is the "knee of the curve"? Which of the graphs best illustrates it?

3. Page 25 starts a long list of speculation by the author. Which one are you most doubtful of? Why? Might be fun to see if you still hold your doubt at end of quarter.

4. Page 30 starts a hypothetical conversation between various past, present and future participants. I like the Ned Ludd story :) Google "Ted Kaczynski" and decide if he was a Luddite.

5. What does Darwin speculate on in the conversation? (We will look at his speculation a little later in course.)

Homework Problems From MIT Debate

These questions are taken from the opening sessions of the MIT clip. Watch it up to the point that both RK and DG have finished their 10 minute opening statements (roughly at the 17 minute mark). You can check out the DVD of the debate from the library if you cannot download it.
1. What does RK say about Emotional Intelligence? What are your thoughts on whether we can build emotional intelligence into coldly logical computers that are based on Boolean Logic?

2. DG argues that we cannot use "software" to build emotional machines. In particular, he argues that one "mind" cannot be ported to another "platform". Why?

Homework Problems From Circuit Building

You will need to use the xLogicCircuits tool in the tools folder.
1. Design a circuit with two inputs and one output. The output is true only when one of the inputs is true, but not both. Note that a standard OR gate is true when one of the inputs is true or when both are true.

   I suggest you follow the same steps as seen in lab: build TT first, build circuit, iconify it, save it in a file called week1-circuit. You do not have to turn anything in from the TT tool, but it should help you to design your circuit before trying to build the circuit. I have included a screenshot of what you should see in the TT tool. Note that what you want is the red column. Whether you have the other columns around it is up to you and the way you design your logic statement.

   
   

   Below is what the grader will expect to see when he opens your saved circuit. Note that I have iconified my circuit as "week1". If I double click it, it will open up to show how I designed my circuit.

   

You should have a minimum of two files you will send to Brad as attachments: (1) a text file with your answers to the reading questions and clip questions, and (2) your week1-circuit file that has your circuit iconified as shown above.