Archive for category Education
University of Cambridge, Wolfson College
Posted by Manfredas Zabarauskas in Education on August 15th, 2009
Wolfson College
So, it's finally official. In less than two months time I'll be reading Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, Wolfson College. Hopefully that's the last university in my universities chain - all in all there are not many better places to go to. Not many at all.
I'm already looking forward to it. To the legendary supervision sessions, to the world class experts in the field, to the competitiveness amongst the students. I'm sure I will finally arrive at the place where I'll be the average guy between the best one's... not the other way around.
(I'm not convinced that the latter applies to the basketball team, though. Well, I guess we'll find that out pretty soon).
Confirmation Letter. Cambridge University, Wolfson College, 2009.
Edinburgh University, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Semester I
Posted by Manfredas Zabarauskas in Education on July 27th, 2009
1 Night in Haskell
Since the exam results came back and the first year is finally over, I have decided to share my impressions about the individual lectures in the first two semesters. Hopefully it will help someone to choose one subject over another, not to make the same mistakes when preparing for the exams that I did, or simply to get the taste of the first year in college. Please bear in mind that all what is written below represents only my personal, highly subjective opinion.
Functional Programming
Professor: Philip Wadler
Lectures: a wonderful introduction to the functional programming. Amazing teaching skills and professor's authority in the classroom - from ripping a T-shirt to reveal a big superman-lambda, to being one of the principal engineers and designers of the Haskell programming language - 10 out of 10.
Exam: Final grade is made by a programming class test (10%) and a final exam (90%). The programming class test is pretty straightforward - three simple tasks to test one's basic knowledge of Haskell (things you need to know are the syntax, because it's done on paper, list comprehension, recursion and simple library functions). The final exam is done in front of computer with plenty of time (2 hours) for three simple tasks (e.g. take a list of integers and return the sum of the cubes of the positive numbers in that list). The only catch is that the same problem has to be solved in a couple of different ways: using basic functions, using list comprehension, using recursion and using the higher-order functions, however... at the end of the day - it's still the same problem.
My advice in succeding in this subject - Read the rest of this entry »