In the upcoming semester I’ll be taking class called Theoretical Computer Science. Which is said to be the hardest thing you can attend here at BUT. Only half the people pass the bar every year. It’s brutal. And since I’d really like to be a part of the lucky half, I thought I could dig into the theory a little earlier and see how bad it is.
So, Computer Science, right? What the hell is all that about? Theoretical computer science or theoretical information technology (as referred by some people) is a formal foundation for the things we like to call computers. What computers do? They essentially compute stuff. Current computer hardware is built and programmed to work with numbers. Who cares about a bunch of numbers? But the numbers represent some sort of information. In broader terms, computers work with information. A computer takes some information and transforms it into another information. What Wikipedia says:
Computer science deals with the theoretical foundations of information, computation, and with practical techniques for their implementation and application. Computer scientists invent algorithmic processes that create, describe, and transform information and formulate suitable abstractions to model complex systems.
Right, so we have information. How do people work with these anyway? People share their thoughts though languages. We talk and sometimes listen, we also read and sometimes write. Other people like to draw, play charades or sing. In all of these cases the information is encoded into some sort of language that others can understand. Sure, we’re people, it comes naturally to us, but what about the machines? A coffeemaker will most certainly not learn to talk to you or even understand your needs. Machines are dumb. That’s where we (the nerdy guys from engineering department) come in with** formal languages** – a substantial part of computer science. By formalizing common languages we make the machines understand our instructions.
Ever heard of a programming language? Programming language is basically a sequence of instructions we use when we tell the computers what to do. It’s a language that we use when we talk to the computers. It sounds a little weird, but that’s it. Computer science sets up some ground rules so the computers can algorithmically analyze the instructions and process them. It explores possibilities of computers – what can be processed by a computer? Is there anything that computers can’t solve, why? Bunch of interesting stuff.
Interesting, but sometimes very hard to understand. I wanted to put some basics here too, but I don’t want to scare you off too early. I got stuck for a while with the very basics at first (I figured it out eventually). The math will come in a stand-alone post shortly after.
Stay tuned ;-).