CMPUT174 Lecture 1: Lecture 1 Introduction Notes

• School: University of Alberta
• Department: Computing Science
• Course: CMPUT174
• Professor: Duane Szafron

Document Summary

Computing science: the study of algorithms, including their properties, their hardware and linguistic realizations, and their applications. What is a program: a set of instructions which tells a computer to perform some actions(s, we write programs because we want to solve problems using a computer, solution to a problem: algorithm, algorithm + data = program. Algorithms vs programs: programs are a representation of an algorithm, different programs can represent the same algorithm. Problem solving: the single most important skill for a computing scientist, formulate the problem precisely. Think creatively about solutions: express solutions clearly and accurately (so you can write a program that implements it) The hard drive contains persistent (non-volatile) storage but is slower in comparison the the memory. Word length: 32 bit cpus 32 bit words, 64 bit cpus 64 bit words, 8 bits = 1 byte, 32 bits = 4 bytes = a word, 64 bits = 8 bytes.