This course's domain is defined pretty much as the complement of everything in the usual undergraduate computer science curriculum. No standard electronic computers. On the other hand, its prerequisites (if there were any) would have to be, not only all the computer science theory there is, but practically all of current human knowledge: quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, molecular biology, and who knows what else. Of course I'm not a guru in these subjects, but I'm foolhardy enough to tread where angels wouldn't dare.
Our object is to study the nature of computation and to see where it might be going in the near and not-so-near future. I expect to have a lot of fun trying to do all this with the students, even if we wind up in strange places.
It is only recently that some very smart people have begun thinking about these issues. The literature is therefore not very coherent, sometimes difficult, and sometimes contradictory. That's typical of a field in its infancy, and can be exciting - but it requires a certain amount of patience and tolerance. What I've done is to try to track down the seminal, most provocative, most stimulating papers, and order them in some way so we can find a path to follow. I'll also try to fill in background material as we hit barriers. This will likely be an adaptive process, and the more the students contribute to the choices, the happier I'll be. After a time, probably after midterm, I plan to have students begin to report on their own reading. Grades will be based on class participation and a final presentation and paper.
To begin, I've picked a few especially broad and interesting (I hope) papers to start with, and then plan to go back to some earlier, key papers and fill in background to put these papers in context.
I'll keep the master reference list
on line,
and the weekly, annotated reading schedule,
dynamically adjusted, in the links below:
Week 1 (Feb. 2)
Week 2 (Feb. 9)
Week 3 (Feb. 16)
Week 4 (Feb. 23)
Week 5 (Mar. 2)
Week 6 (Mar. 9)
Down the Road