CS CM124 Winter 2013

Prof is a nice guy... really relaxed and if you need help just go to him or the TA.

The class isn't too demanding, but if you want to work more on the final project you can always make it more challenging for yourself.

HW/MT/Final are just there to show you kinda whats going on.. the TA helps you through all of them during discussions. And by helps you through them i mean walks you through the problems, and solutions. Lectures/Discussions are all filmed and posted, which is nice.

Final Project: For this quarter, he gave us a list of projects to pick from, and corresponding difficulty levels. If you dont have much time or dont really feel like you know whats going on, just pick an easy one... and if you get the hang of it you can add more to the project to challenge yourself. The project is the majority of the grade, i believe. For future classes he said he might mix it up, but probably similar stuff (pick your own language to code in, etc).

There is a presentation for the project at the end of the quarter. 10 min of explain what you did. Not coding details.. just the big picture and your results like accuracy and run time. Kinda strange.. but you vote on your classmates via text. Not sure if this actually affects the grade, but you get participation for doing it.

Interesting peak into a different side of CS.. i'd recommend the class. Not hard, good prof, not too stressful... and you learn along the way.

I took this class for my Bioinformatics minor, so I may not have had as strong a math/computational background as other students, but I think even the CS majors were struggling most of the time. Even though the material is extremely dense, the graded parts aren't bad. The HW is hard, but going to discussion every week is helpful. They also go over the practice midterm and final, which are very similar to the real exams. Even though linear algebra wasn't an enforced pre-req, you're definitely at a disadvantage if you haven't taken Math 33A or something similar. Lots of stuff about matrices that you'll have to teach yourself. Overall I think this class had interesting topics that mostly went over my head.