MARVIN
Educational computer science material
MARVIN stands for "MARVelous INaccurate acronym's bother me," and was
the deeply depressed robot from Hitchhiker's. Perhaps Marvin was
depressed because his inner needs were ignored as he was overwhelmed
by the vast details, complexities and technicalities of computer
science. Well, we'd like to cheer both Marvin and YOU up with the
following resources that help make the concepts of computer science
clear, accessible and enjoyable.
- Educational computer science songs.
- With our Stinky
Programming Language for student doodles,
you can make Fractals with only step, left, push, and reduce.
- Project Othello - Writeups and
results of 18 student projects applying genetic
programming to the game Othello.
- On-line Decision tree system to graphically illustrate
Guess-the-Animal, as well as recursive partitioning (a machine
learning technique) -- Forthcoming (by Oct. 1999).
- There is also an intro to computer science
version of the Othello project.
- Meta-Pi
Story.
- Get a Life (cellular automata demo).
- Quotes on how cool computer science is
- Check out these
online
sorting demos -- they will show you visually that
some sorting algorithms are much faster than others. To start
an algorithm, click just below the name of the algorithm.
- The year-2000 bug is nothing compared to McDonald's
100GB Bug.
- The Oracle problem and solution --
"I know that you know that he knows that she
knows that I have blue eyes. Therefore, I must kill myself." Logical, yes?
- Try to get
the U2 rock band over the bridge in time! (Demo of greedy search)
- Dynamic interactive stochastic coin-tossin' binomial bell-curvey histogram visual demo of binomial distributions.
- If you liked "guess the animal" (a.k.a., "20 questions") in class,
you can try out this kind of decision tree on the web with the
Guess the evil dictator
or sitcom character game.
- For entertainment: Excel backdoors -- Weird things about Excel that users are not supposed to know.
- Stable Marriage Algorithm Demo (Java applet)
- Tips on writing a research or class paper
- Induction via recursive partitioning, interactive, illustrated
(forthcoming)
- Meta-mail: Marvin's evil email virus!
- The paradox web page
- The Recursive Melody
problem - it's cute, catchy, repetitive and annoying! Also, Listen to the
solution.
- Computer
science encyclopedia/glossary of terms which are all interlinked
and inter-related (this is external to the Marvin site).
- computer system glossary
- computer programming glossary
- Non-digitial computers? Church-Turing Thesis disproved? Check this out.
booger@stinky.com