CSC 200 Undergraduate Problem Seminar: Assignments

First, internalize the problem...

• The assignments will be posted here after the day's class, along with the due date. Assignments are due at the beginning of class on the due date. In general, no credit will be allowed for for late assignments. Turn what you have in in for partial credit.
  
  
• For any assignment, I expect a well organized report-style writeup that describes in detail what you did, why you did it, and what the results were. This includes negative results. Scratch work and computer code, if requested should be appended to the main writeup with appropriate pointers.
  
  
• Attribute ANY work that is not your own, including software off the web, text cribbed from other sources, etc. You are encouraged to look for resources, but not to the extent that it negates the point of the assignment. This is sometimes a fine line, especially in programming assignments. I will try to be specific as to what I expect you to write as a minimum. If in doubt, ask. In any case, use of UN-attributed material is plagiarism, and a violation of the University's academic honesty policy.
  Plagiarism is taken VERY seriously in this department. DON'T DO IT. If in doubt, reference.
  
  
• Specifically, text taken from web pages, even a single sentence, is plagiarism. Text paraphrased from web pages is plagiarism. Sentences from web pages cut up into phrases and re-arranged are plagiarism. If you want to avoid possible problems, my suggestion is never write while looking at text. Generate everything from your own understanding of the subject.
  
  
• Use of unattributed text in any written assignment will result in zero credit for that assignment. Text that comes from an outside source should appear in quotes. Too much use of quoted material will tend to reduce your credit for an assignment, as the point of written assignments is to convey your understanding of a subject.
  
  
• In general, you should consider written assignments for this course to be public documents - just as published research papers are public documents. As such I may place them in a forum where they may be scrutinized by your colleagues for accuracy, clarity, and for unattributed material.
  
  
• You are encouraged to discuss general techniques and specific approaches to general problems with your fellow students, or anyone else. Unless specifically directed in an assignment, however, you are not to share code you have written, or your written solutions to specific problems.
  
  

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

• Class activity: Introductory material, Survey forms.
• Class activity: Ultima Thule.
• Assignment 1:
  Bring to class the densest object you can find with a mass between 10 and 1000 gm. Also bring in the least dense solid object you can find with mass between 1.0 and 100 gm. Solid means no internal holes larger than 1mm, (so balloons don't count as low-density objects). Determine the density of your objects to two significant figures. Prepare a writeup describing how you did this. Be ready to present it to the class. No snarky cleverness such as "this object is composed of widely separated nuclei whose density is 2.3 x 10^14 gm/cc".
  
  Due: Wednesday, January 23, 2019.
  

Monday, January 21, 2013.

• Class activity: MLK day of reflection/service
  
  

Wednesday, January 23, 2019.

• Class activity: Testing of density.
• Class activity: Terraforming Mars.
• Assignment: Construct a sturdy, physical dodecahedron at least 1 inch between parallel faces (bigger is fine). Structure should be strong enough to support a five pound load in any orientation. A single-layer paper structure for which templates can be found and printed on the internet will probably not suffice (I expect a little more effort than that). Artifacts that somehow semantically satisfy my attempt to specify the desired degree of strength, but have flimsy aspects (e.g. just a ball with weak paper extensions) are counter to the spirit of the assignment. This is not a class about legalisms. Shape should be accurate to 1/10 inch. Any material that does the job is OK. (Again, I am not interested in semantic tricks like virtual materials, or a bottle of water that could be argued to contain any shape...) You may work by yourself, or in teams of 2. The solids will be tested in class.
  
  Due: Monday, January 28, 2019.

Monday, January 28, 2019

• Class activity: Testing of Euclidean solids.
• Class activity: Getting to space. Elevators and Catapults.
• Assignment: Write a short program in C that counts to 1 trillion (that is, 10^12), by ones. By definition, this means that your program must go through at least 10^12 states. There is one very small subtlety here, but your program should need to be be no more than a few lines long. Run and time your program. On a gigahertz processor, you should be able to run such a program in under an hour or so (you can check progress by writing a version that prints something every billion counts or so). If you are not running fast enough, go back and write something that will run faster.
  
  If it completes very quickly (faster than your processor could possibly execute a trillion operations) some smart optimizer has figured out your loop did something that was never used and got rid of it. Fix things so your program actually goes through the trillion counting states. Now the fun part. Get hold of the .o file compiled version of your code. Map and count the bits that occur in non-zero bytes. (The reason for the non-zero byte condition is that .o files are generally padded with non-functional 0s to fill out some integral block condition on length) Figure out a way to flip an arbitrarily selected bit in the non-zero-byte portion of the .o file. Now experiment with flipping a single bit, and then try to re-link and re-run the program. Try this for every bit in your program. What percent of the time does the program
  A. Fail to link successfully.
  B. Crash or terminate prematurely in the first five seconds of running.
  C. Run for five seconds or more with no obvious problems.
  If the program fails to link in all cases find the parity check that the linker is using to identify a corrupt file and work around it.
  
  You might need to be a bit careful on a Windows system (though I hope not). Linux has been fairly well projected for a long time against programs getting out of their space, but early Windows systems would let you jump or write to vital system areas by mucking with a binary, and crash the OS. I really hope this is no longer true, but am basically a Windows ignoramus, and don't know for sure.
  
  Now the really fun part. Can you think of a way to write a program (doing the same counting) that is less susceptible to single bit flips? (other than increasing the length of the program with a lot of garbage code that is never executed). The idea is, given a certain probability that a stored bit will be corrupted over time, is there a way to make a stored program less susceptible to such damage. Increasing the length with no-ops doesn't help in this case, because the original program is still there and has the same probability of being whacked somewhere.
  
  Turn in a writeup of your results, including a printout of your program (Just so I can check that it actually counts to a trillion. Don't worry. I almost never will want to look a source code).
  
  Due: Wednesday, January 30, 2019.
  

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

• Class activity: Discussion of program damage results
• Class activity: Discussion of Fermi
• Assignment:

  [Note that the following description is not an actual current NSF program, but it captures the flavor of many past and present NSF initiatives.]

  Recognizing that many of the most creative endeavors in history have been accomplished by very young people, the Federal Government has decided to offer UGR (UnderGraduate Research) awards. These awards are intended to support highly innovative research primarily conceived by undergraduate students that is high risk, but has high potential payoff. Grants of up to $1,000,000 are available to support investigations into basic science and technology or its applications that have the potential to produce revolutionary contributions in areas of national public interest, including (but not limited to) industrial productivity, energy production, transportation, security, defense, law enforcement, housing, urban development, workforce utilization, medicine, health care, education, communication, environment.

  Find the NSF web page, and read up on the CISE program, including what is expected in a proposal, and the evaluation criteria.

  Write a 2-5 page proposal summary describing an idea for innovative UGR research, its potential benefits, an outline of a research plan, and what resources you need to to get the project going. For this excercise you do not need a complete budget or detailed references and background. The written proposal is to be handed in.

  On Monday, you will have five minutes to sell the idea to the UGR committee (the rest of the class), using your voice, chalk, an overhead projector, and anything else you can carry into the room that does not require any setup time.
  
  Due: Monday, February 4, 2019.
  
  

Monday, February 4, 2019

• Class activity: Mystery object
• Class activity: Discussion of UGR proposals.
• Assignment: Use base-level numerical optimization to solve the brachistochrone problem (look it up if you don't know what it is) for the case of a sliding mass, initially at rest, moving down one meter (e.g. in y) and across one meter (e.g. in x) (in earth-normal gravity). By base-level I mean, a program calling only basic library functions (e.g. sin, sqrt, read, write, print, etc.) No numerical packages, no canned differential equation solvers. The idea is to figure out how this sort of computation is done. Splitting x into 100 or so segments and doing piecewise linear integration of the motion along each segment to compute the sliding time will probably suffice for this problem, as the solution is a smooth curve. The trick is the search efficiently through the space of piecewise linear curves for the best. Graph your solution curve, and compare it to the theoretically optimal cycloid. Also compare your time to the theoretical minimum. Writeup as usual.
  Due: Monday, February 11 2013.
• Assignment: For next class, bring in three naturally broken artifacts, i.e., objects, not deliberately broken by you for this assignment, that no longer serve their original function. For each, determine what failed, and how the artifact could have been made differently so as not to fail in the manner it did. Write up your discoveries.

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

• Class activity: Discussion of Broken Artifacts.
• Class activity: Discussion of UGR proposals cont.

Monday, February 11, 2019

• Class activity: Discussion of UGR proposals cont.
• Assignment: Propose a research project for this course. Be prepared to talk about it in class.
  Due, Monday, February 18, 2019

Monday, February 18, 2019

• Class activity: Research project initial presentations

• Class activity: Research project initial presentations cont.

• Class activity: Research project initial presentations cont.

• Class activity: Research project initial presentations cont.

• Class activity: Presentation from Mohammad Hedayati

March 11,13, 2019

• Class activity: Spring Break!!!

Monday, March 18, 2019

• Class activity: Presentation from Taylan Sen

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

• Class activity: Research project update presentations

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