Change Contents of the Bubble
Welcome to CS1315. Click on the python to add comments.

Looking for the book? They have it at the Engineer's Bookstore at 748 Marietta St NW. Here is there website: http://www.engrbookstore.com/ - Monica

Hotspots: Slides and Code • TA Corner • Comments? • Announcements • FAQ • Static Webspace
View this PageEdit this Page (locked)Uploads to this PageHistory of this PageHomeRecent ChangesSearchHelp Guide

Midterm Exam 1 Review Spring 2004: CS concepts

(Return to Sp2004 Midterm 1 Review)

Questions, answers, comments on answers, comments on questions?


I skipped Moore's "Law" in the first/second lecture. (Sorry!) Check the slides & book. Colin Potts
1. Algorithm- How a program works completely separate from how it is written.
2. Heirarchical decomposition- breaking down programs into smaller parts again and again until it can be easily programmed. This is good to keep each function doing "one and only one thing".
3. Comments- Explain what you are doing to yourself and others, b/c it is hard to remember details if you come back later.
4. Encoding- ways that computers "know things". Eight wires make up a bit and on each wire, there is either voltage or not. Voltage=1 and No Voltage=0. These wires combine to communicate information with the computer. Everything that the computer works with is encoded in its bytes.
5. Moore's Law- # of transistors double at the same price every 18 months. Same $ will buy you 2x as much computing power.
Meredith Harman
Very nice, except for "encoding." "These wires combine to communication information with the computer." Yeah, but what's an encoding? Think about how we go from wires to information. Mark Guzdial
Encoding - converting plain text into code, like ASCII. I'm sure there's more to it, but that's my $.02 so far! Andrea Dunlop
Andrea, not quite, encoding encompases more than just text. Check out the lecutre notes on picture encoding. Greg Leo
Think about it this way, Andrea. A single byte COULD be a character (like 'a'), the red part of a pixel, part of a piece of sound, etc. What determines how we interpret that byte? Mark Guzdial

An encoding is a representation of an image, etc. in terms of bits. It's not actually a picture or a sound, etc., but it represents one.
An encoding isn't the representation – it defines the mapping. Mark Guzdial

encoding-information that represents a picture, character, pixel, etc. that is made up of 0's and 1's (no voltage/voltage)stored in the bits of the computer and read using the binary number system Amanda Slaughter
Is this right?
Computers understand only 0s and 1s but we can't read everything in binary, so the translation of binary digits to something more userfriendly is needed. The process of this translation is called encoding. Different kinds of encodings are done by different software. Example: In ASCII #s are interepreted as alphabets.
Just to make sure I understand the concept of encoding
First the computer has wires that either have a voltage or don't. Depending, a series of 0 or 1's will be put together and encoded in bytes, in other words, stored in the computers memory. The computer then interprets these 0 and 1's to be numbers or letters or web pages etc. If I understand correctly it is actually the interpretation of the 0s and 1s that is the encoding process.
Annapurma has it right. Encoding is the process of interpretation. A byte might be a character, the redness of a pixel, etc. We apply an encoding (a mapping from bytes to information) to decide how we'll interpret the bytes. ASCII is one kind of encoding. JPEG is another. Mark Guzdial


Link to this Page