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JOHN GUTTAG: All right, welcome to the 60002,

or if you were in 600, the second half of 600.

I'm John Guttag.

Let me start with a few administrative things.

What's the workload?

There are problem sets.

They'll all be programming problems

much in the style of 60001.

And the goal-- really twofold.

60001 problem sets were mostly about you

learning to be a programmer.

A lot of that carries over.

No one learns to be a programmer in half a semester.

So a lot of it is to improve your skills,

but also there's a lot more, I would say,

conceptual, algorithmic material in 60002,

and the problem sets are designed

to help cement that as well as just

to give you programming experience.

Finger exercises, small things.

If they're taking you more than 15 minutes, let us know.

They really shouldn't, and they're generally

designed to help you learn a single concept, usually

a programming concept.

Reading assignments in the textbooks,

I've already posted the first reading assignment,

and essentially they should provide you a very different

take on the same material we're covering

in lectures and recitations.

We've tried to choose different examples for lectures

and from the textbooks for the most part,

so you get to see things in two slightly different ways.

There'll be a final exam based upon all of the above.

All right, prerequisites-- experience

writing object-oriented programs in Python, preferably

Python 3.5.

Familiarity with concepts of computational complexity.

You'll see even in today's lecture,

we'll be assuming that.

Familiarity with some simple algorithms.

If you took 60001 or you took the 60001 advanced

standing exam, you'll be fine.

Odds are you'll be fine anyway, but that's

the safest way to do it.

So the programming assignments are

going to be a bit easier, at least that's

what students have reported in the past,

because they'll be more focused on the problem to be solved

than on the actual programming.

The lecture content, more abstract.

The lectures will be--

and maybe I'm speaking euphemistically--

a bit faster paced.

So hang on to your seats.

And the course is really less about programming

and more about dipping your toe into the exotic world of data

science.

We do want you to hone your programming skills.

There'll be a few additional bits of Python.

Today, for example, we'll talk about lambda abstraction.

Inevitably, some comments about software engineering,

how to structure your code, more emphasis in using packages.

Hopefully it will go a little bit smoother

than in the last problem set in 60001.

And finally, it's the old joke about programming

that somebody walks up to a taxi driver in New York City

and says, "I'm lost.

How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"

The taxi driver turns to the person

and says, "practice, practice, practice."

And that's really the only way to learn to program

is practice, practice, practice.

The main topic of the course is what I think

of as computational models.

How do we use computation to understand

the world in which we live?

What is a model?

To me I think of it as an experimental device

that can help us to either understand something that

has happened, to sort of build a model that explains phenomena

we see every day, or a model that

will allow us to predict the future, something

that hasn't happened.

So you can think of, for example, a climate change

model.

We can build models that sort of explain how the climate has

changed over the millennia, and then we

can build probably a slightly different model

that might predict what it will be like in the future.

So essentially what's happening is

science is moving out of the wet lab and into the computer.

Increasingly, I'm sure you all see this--

those of you who are science majors--

an increasing reliance on computation rather than

traditional experimentation.

As we'll talk about, traditional experimentation

is and will remain important, but now it

has to really be supplemented by computation.

We'll talk about three kinds of models--

optimization models, statistical models, and simulation models.

So let's talk first about optimization models.

An optimization model is a very simple thing.

We start with an objective function that's either

to be maximized or minimized.

So for, example, if I'm going from New York to Boston,

I might want to find a route by car or plane

or train that minimizes the total travel time.

So my objective function would be

the number of minutes spent in transit getting from a to b.

We then often have to layer on top of that objective function

a set of constraints, sometimes empty, that we have to obey.

So maybe the fastest way to get from New York to Boston

is to take a plane, but I only have $100 to spend.

So that option is off the table.

So I have the constraints there on the amount

of money I can spend.

Or maybe I have to be in Boston before 5:00 PM

and while the bus would get me there for $15,

it won't get me there before 5:00.

And so maybe what I'm left with is driving,

something like that.

So objective function, something you're either

minimizing or maximizing, and a set of constraints

that eliminate some solutions.

And as we'll see, there's an asymmetry here.

We handle these two things differently.

We use these things all the time.

I commute to work using Waze, which essentially is solving--

not very well, I believe-- an optimization problem

to minimize my time from home to here.

When you travel, maybe you log into various advisory programs

that try and optimize things for you.

They're all over the place.

Today you really can't avoid using optimization algorithm

as you get through life.

Pretty abstract.

Let's talk about a specific optimization problem

called the knapsack problem.

The first time I talked about the knapsack problem

I neglected to show a picture of a knapsack,

and I was 10 minutes into it before I

realized most of the class had no idea what a knapsack was.

It's what we old people used to call a backpack,

and they used to look more like that than they look today.

So the knapsack problem involves--

usually it's told in terms of a burglar who breaks into a house

and wants to steal a bunch of stuff

but has a knapsack that will only

hold a finite amount of stuff that he or she wishes to steal.

And so the burglar has to solve the optimization problem

of stealing the stuff with the most value while obeying

the constraint that it all has to fit in the knapsack.

So we have an objective function.

I'll get the most for this when I fence it.

And a constraint, it has to fit in my backpack.

And you can guess which of these might be

the most valuable items here.

So here is in words, written words what I just said orally.

There's more stuff than you can carry,

and you have to choose which stuff to take

and which to leave behind.

I should point out that there are two variants of it.

There's the 0/1 knapsack problem and the continuous.

The 0/1 would be illustrated by something like this.