(no subject)

[godream]

Food and porn.

So next semester, I'm thinking it's going to be 6.003, 6.004, 6.034, and 24.900. I'm tempted to try to throw some sort of fluffy foofy HASS in there as well 'cause I'm behind one, but I gather 6.003 and 6.004 can get pretty hosing in combination so maybe not so much.

6.003 is Signals and Systems, and currently voted Most Likely to Kick My Ass All Over as it involves all sorts of cracktastic 18.03 (differential equations) stuff. Fundamentals of signal and system analysis, with applications drawn from filtering, audio and image processing, communications, and automatic control. Topics include convolution, Fourier series and transforms, sampling and discrete-time processing of continuous-time signals, modulation, Laplace and Z-transforms, and feedback systems. The professor this spring is allegedly awesome though.

6.004, Computation Structures, has a reputation of being the warmest and fuzziest of the four main EECS courses, the double-ohs. Introduces architecture of digital systems, emphasizing structural principles common to a wide range of technologies. Multilevel implementation strategies; definition of new primitives (e.g., gates, instructions, procedures, and processes) and their mechanization using lower-level elements. Analysis of potential concurrency; precedence constraints and performance measures; pipelined and multidimensional systems. Instruction set design issues; architectural support for contemporary software structures. Will hopefully be interesting and fun.

6.034 - Artificial Intelligence! Introduces representations, techniques, and architectures used to build applied systems and to account for intelligence from a computational point of view. Applications of rule chaining, heuristic search, constraint propagation, constrained search, inheritance, and other problem-solving paradigms. Applications of identification trees, neural nets, genetic algorithms, and other learning paradigms. Speculations on the contributions of human vision and language systems to human intelligence. It's one of the header classes for Computer Science and will also allegedly have a good lecturer this coming term. (And the less horrible pset collection as opposed to the fall.)

24.900, Intro to Linguistics -- I've heard good things and bad things but the material sounds really really interesting to me. Subject studies what is language and what does knowledge of a language consist of. It asks how do children learn languages and is language unique to humans; why are there many languages; how do languages change; is any language or dialect superior to another; and how are speech and writing related. Context for these and similar questions provided by basic examination of internal organization of sentences, words, and sound systems. Assumes no prior training in linguistics. Plus it fulfills a portion of MIT's humanities requirement (it's a HASS-D) and (heh) if I don't start taking care of that the institvte starts to get very unhappy with me. HASS-D classes are lotteried, though, so I may not get into the class and end up having to take something else for this spring... not sure how likely that is.

Other things vaguely under consideration which will probably happen in some later semester: Strobe Lab (because I don't think I could survive any of the 6-1 labs and there is no 6-3 institute lab), 18.06 (a prereq for interesting CS classes), 6.046 (a 6-3 header, and I hear it's awesome), 6.171 (material sounds really useful, I hear it's a really good class, it's only offered in the spring, oh god why aren't I taking this?), entirely too many more.

... and now back to getting through *this* semester.

Comments

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

24.900: Who is the prof? Everyone I knew liked this class, then a bunch of people took it last spring, including me, and got the crappy prof, and hated it.

6.004: It's interesting and fun, and probably the least time-consuming of the 00foos, but if you go in thinking it's going to be a walk in the park you are wrong. It's not fuzzy or fluffy.

6.171: That's the Software Engineering for Web Applications class, right? I hear Abelson rocks, but I also hear 6.170 is a prereq - have you taken that?

HASS: Be careful assuming that HASS classes will be fluffy and foofy. I've had a couple that I thought were easy, and a couple that were really difficult, but no fluffy cakewalks. Of course, if you pick your HASS classes to be fluffy (and aren't concentrating in 17 like me), that's different, but maybe not the best attitude to have.

[cassandraia.livejournal.com]

24.900 is less hardcore when it comes to the reading and the writing than what I've heard about most HASS classes. We have no assigned reading and only one actual writing assignment But the downside is that we have psets. Actual (if dumbed down a bit) problems from linguistics. And we have tests that require you to have studied and learned the material, not read the book and have a good brain for BSing something about a possible interpretation. We also have to remember it for the final. Lots of crap from September. And, as my stomach lining is reminding me, we have a paper to do. To be sure, this is less than the paper-a-week that some of my friends do, but it's decently long (8-10) and there's significantly less margin for completely screwing it up.
The person who's teaching it this term is Professor (Norvin) Richards, and he's awesome. I don't know how you'd check who's teaching it next semester. You might wait on the linguistics and try for it when you know he'll be teaching it, if he turns out not to be teaching the Spring semester.

I took somethng like 18.06 last year (at least, it was called Linear Algebra) and it wasn't nearly as scary as 18.03 looks. All matrices and transformations and good stuff like that.

[godream.livejournal.com]

I'm told 24.900 is on some sort of a three-term prof rotation -- Websis says S. Flynn is slated to teach it this spring, although Websis seems to be less than spectacularly reliable when it comes to who's-teaching-what.

I'm taking 6.170 now (and am waiting for Eclipse to quit misbehaving so I can get back to tooling for the final project prelim release Monday as I type this), so I've got the prereqs for 6.171. I've definitely heard volumes of good things about the prof and the class, and the material is stuff that I'd really like to know more about... so if I don't take it now I probably will next year.

I feel bad thinking about selecting HASSes on the basis of fluffiness as opposed to awesomeness... I really honest to God do think humanities are important, they're something I enjoy, something I'd pursue even if there weren't a requirement. At the same time I feel like the structure of the requirements sorta gets in the way of being able to take the HASS classes that I'm really excited about, so in that sense: yeah, I'd like to have more of the mandatory song-and-dance routine over with so as to be able to pursue awesome, so the temptation to try to find the easiest route through is strong there.

... and fluffy is a relative term; I've got a habit of talking and writing in extreme terms where they're not necessarily warranted. In my head everything's rated with respect to where I am now: class x eats fewer souls than 6.170, class y will probably elude my comprehension slightly less than 6.002 (I am so very much not a 6-1 person), scale to the appropriate degree of realism. Thank you for the warnings nonetheless.

[godream.livejournal.com]

I've heard all sorts of things about 18.06 here, most recently that the first half is (relatively) easy and useful, and then the second half is horrible and useless. This may or may not be remotely true.

Linguistics: one of my friends at a liberal-arts school gets to use linguistics for part of her math/science requirement because of the pset-esque analytical thinking aspect, which amuses me no end.

[beat-the-beaver.livejournal.com]

Flynn next semester, huh? I'm pretty sure that's the prof I had last spring...

[godream.livejournal.com]

Aw, dammit. Does that mean essay psets?

[beat-the-beaver.livejournal.com]

Not essays, Alison. In 24.900, we write 'prose.'

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

S. Flynn is the crappy prof. It's possible that a) you will like the class anyway, and/or b) experience has made her a better teacher.

[(Anonymous)]

She has really high evaluations though. Are you sure?

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

It wasn't so much that she was a bad lecturer, but she was overly pedantic and her tests had terribly worded questions and seemed to be thrown together haphazardly. And she taught us material that's not supposed to be covered in 24.900 (which is after all an intro course). Pretty much everyone I know who took the class with me believed that we got screwed - and it's also illustrative that most of the people who took it with me disliked it, whereas most of the people I know who took it other terms really liked it.