Download or read book Computational Fairy Tales written by Jeremy Kubica and published by Jeremy Kubica. This book was released on 2012 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Introduces principles of computational thinking, illustrating high-level computer science concepts, the motivation behind them, and their application in a non-computer fairy tale domain."--Amazon.com.
Download or read book The CS Detective written by Jeremy Kubica and published by No Starch Press. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet Frank Runtime. Disgraced ex-detective. Hard-boiled private eye. Search expert. When a robbery hits police headquarters, it’s up to Frank Runtime and his extensive search skills to catch the culprits. In this detective story, you’ll learn how to use algorithmic tools to solve the case. Runtime scours smugglers’ boats with binary search, tails spies with a search tree, escapes a prison with depth-first search, and picks locks with priority queues. Joined by know-it-all rookie Officer Notation and inept tag-along Socks, he follows a series of leads in a best-first search that unravels a deep conspiracy. Each chapter introduces a thrilling twist matched with a new algorithmic concept, ending with a technical recap. Perfect for computer science students and amateur sleuths alike, The CS Detective adds an entertaining twist to learning algorithms. Follow Frank’s mission and learn: –The algorithms behind best-first and depth-first search, iterative deepening, parallelizing, binary search, and more –Basic computational concepts like strings, arrays, stacks, and queues –How to adapt search algorithms to unusual data structures –The most efficient algorithms to use in a given situation, and when to apply common-sense heuristic methods
Download or read book Best Practices of Spell Design written by Jeremy Kubica and published by Jeremy Kubica. This book was released on 2013-01-21 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Best Practices of Spell Design introduces practical aspects of software development that are often learned through painful experience. Through Marcus and Shelly's quest, the story encourages readers to think about how to write readable, well-tested and maintainable programs."--Page 4 of cover
Download or read book Fairy Tale written by Marina Warner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marina Warner guides us through the rich world of fairy tale, from Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel to Snow White and Pan's Labyrinth. Exploring pervasive themes of folklore, myth, the supernatural, imagination, and fantasy, Warner highlights the impact of the genre on human understanding, history, and culture.
Download or read book Lauren Ipsum written by Carlos Bueno and published by Off-By-One Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No computers will be found in this book. If the idea of a computer science book without computers upsets you, please close your eyes until you’ve finished reading the rest of this page. The truth is that computer science is not really about the computer. It is just a tool to help you see ideas more clearly. You can see the moon and stars without a telescope, smell the flowers without a fluoroscope, have fun without a funoscope, and be silly sans oscilloscope. You can also play with computer science without... you-know-what. Ideas are the real stuff of computer science. This book is about those ideas, and how to find them.
Download or read book Once Upon an Algorithm written by Martin Erwig and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This easy-to-follow introduction to computer science reveals how familiar stories like Hansel and Gretel, Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Potter illustrate the concepts and everyday relevance of computing. Picture a computer scientist, staring at a screen and clicking away frantically on a keyboard, hacking into a system, or perhaps developing an app. Now delete that picture. In Once Upon an Algorithm, Martin Erwig explains computation as something that takes place beyond electronic computers, and computer science as the study of systematic problem solving. Erwig points out that many daily activities involve problem solving. Getting up in the morning, for example: You get up, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast. This simple daily routine solves a recurring problem through a series of well-defined steps. In computer science, such a routine is called an algorithm. Erwig illustrates a series of concepts in computing with examples from daily life and familiar stories. Hansel and Gretel, for example, execute an algorithm to get home from the forest. The movie Groundhog Day illustrates the problem of unsolvability; Sherlock Holmes manipulates data structures when solving a crime; the magic in Harry Potter’s world is understood through types and abstraction; and Indiana Jones demonstrates the complexity of searching. Along the way, Erwig also discusses representations and different ways to organize data; “intractable” problems; language, syntax, and ambiguity; control structures, loops, and the halting problem; different forms of recursion; and rules for finding errors in algorithms. This engaging book explains computation accessibly and shows its relevance to daily life. Something to think about next time we execute the algorithm of getting up in the morning.
Download or read book The Irresistible Fairy Tale written by Jack Zipes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative new theory about fairy tales from one of the world's leading authorities If there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved, and spread—or why so many people cannot resist its appeal, no matter how it changes or what form it takes. In this book, renowned fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes presents a provocative new theory about why fairy tales were created and retold—and why they became such an indelible and infinitely adaptable part of cultures around the world. Drawing on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and other fields, Zipes presents a nuanced argument about how fairy tales originated in ancient oral cultures, how they evolved through the rise of literary culture and print, and how, in our own time, they continue to change through their adaptation in an ever-growing variety of media. In making his case, Zipes considers a wide range of fascinating examples, including fairy tales told, collected, and written by women in the nineteenth century; Catherine Breillat's film adaptation of Perrault's "Bluebeard"; and contemporary fairy-tale drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that critique canonical print versions. While we may never be able to fully explain fairy tales, The Irresistible Fairy Tale provides a powerful theory of how and why they evolved—and why we still use them to make meaning of our lives.
Download or read book The Pattern On The Stone written by W. Daniel Hillis and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people are baffled by how computers work and assume that they will never understand them. What they don't realize -- and what Daniel Hillis's short book brilliantly demonstrates -- is that computers' seemingly complex operations can be broken down into a few simple parts that perform the same simple procedures over and over again. Computer wizard Hillis offers an easy-to-follow explanation of how data is processed that makes the operations of a computer seem as straightforward as those of a bicycle. Avoiding technobabble or discussions of advanced hardware, the lucid explanations and colorful anecdotes in The Pattern on the Stone go straight to the heart of what computers really do. Hillis proceeds from an outline of basic logic to clear descriptions of programming languages, algorithms, and memory. He then takes readers in simple steps up to the most exciting developments in computing today -- quantum computing, parallel computing, neural networks, and self-organizing systems. Written clearly and succinctly by one of the world's leading computer scientists, The Pattern on the Stone is an indispensable guide to understanding the workings of that most ubiquitous and important of machines: the computer.
Download or read book Grimm Legacies written by Jack Zipes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Grimm Legacies, esteemed literary scholar Jack Zipes explores the legacy of the Brothers Grimm in Europe and North America, from the nineteenth century to the present. Zipes reveals how the Grimms came to play a pivotal and unusual role in the evolution of Western folklore and in the history of the most significant cultural genre in the world—the fairy tale. Folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm sought to discover and preserve a rich abundance of stories emanating from an oral tradition, and encouraged friends, colleagues, and strangers to gather and share these tales. As a result, hundreds of thousands of wonderful folk and fairy tales poured into books throughout Europe and have kept coming. Zipes looks at the transformation of the Grimms' tales into children's literature, the Americanization of the tales, the "Grimm" aspects of contemporary tales, and the tales' utopian impulses. He shows that the Grimms were not the first scholars to turn their attention to folk tales, but were vital in expanding readership and setting the high standards for folk-tale collecting that continue through the current era. Zipes concludes with a look at contemporary adaptations of the tales and raises questions about authenticity, target audience, and consumerism. With erudition and verve, Grimm Legacies examines the lasting universal influence of two brothers and their collected tales on today's storytelling world.
Download or read book Algorithmic Puzzles written by Anany Levitin and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-10-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Algorithmic puzzles are puzzles involving well-defined procedures for solving problems. This book will provide an enjoyable and accessible introduction to algorithmic puzzles that will develop the reader's algorithmic thinking. The first part of this book is a tutorial on algorithm design strategies and analysis techniques. Algorithm design strategies — exhaustive search, backtracking, divide-and-conquer and a few others — are general approaches to designing step-by-step instructions for solving problems. Analysis techniques are methods for investigating such procedures to answer questions about the ultimate result of the procedure or how many steps are executed before the procedure stops. The discussion is an elementary level, with puzzle examples, and requires neither programming nor mathematics beyond a secondary school level. Thus, the tutorial provides a gentle and entertaining introduction to main ideas in high-level algorithmic problem solving. The second and main part of the book contains 150 puzzles, from centuries-old classics to newcomers often asked during job interviews at computing, engineering, and financial companies. The puzzles are divided into three groups by their difficulty levels. The first fifty puzzles in the Easier Puzzles section require only middle school mathematics. The sixty puzzle of average difficulty and forty harder puzzles require just high school mathematics plus a few topics such as binary numbers and simple recurrences, which are reviewed in the tutorial. All the puzzles are provided with hints, detailed solutions, and brief comments. The comments deal with the puzzle origins and design or analysis techniques used in the solution. The book should be of interest to puzzle lovers, students and teachers of algorithm courses, and persons expecting to be given puzzles during job interviews.
Download or read book The Fairy Tale and Its Uses in Contemporary New Media and Popular Culture written by Claudia Schwabe and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Fairy Tale and its Uses in Contemporary New Media and Popular Culture" that was published in Humanities
Download or read book The Acceleration of Cultural Change written by R. Alexander Bentley and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.
Download or read book Dragon by Midnight written by Karen Kincy and published by Karen Kincy. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once upon a time, a curse turned Cinderella into a dragon. At the stroke of midnight, Cinderella falls to the ballroom floor and twists into a dragon. Hunted by royals, she flees from the castle and hides in the wilderness. Lost. Alone. Afraid. She needs a hero to save her. The prince never rescues her. Instead, she’s saved by a dark-eyed sorcerer named Sikandar. He promises to break the dragon curse. Even though she feels like a hideous beast, he sees her beauty. But Sikandar's charm hides an ugly past. He's too afraid, at first, to share his painful secrets with Cinderella. She can't help falling for him, even though happily ever after might be forever out of reach. Dragon by Midnight is a young adult fantasy with a sweet, slow-burn romance, perfect for fans of Ella Enchanted and Dealing with Dragons. Shortlisted for 2022 US Selfies by Publishers Weekly and BookLife. Nominated for 2022 RONE Award by InD'tale Magazine.
Download or read book Coding as a Playground written by Marina Umaschi Bers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-05 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coding as a Playground, Second Edition focuses on how young children (aged 7 and under) can engage in computational thinking and be taught to become computer programmers, a process that can increase both their cognitive and social-emotional skills. Learn how coding can engage children as producers—and not merely consumers—of technology in a playful way. You will come away from this groundbreaking work with an understanding of how coding promotes developmentally appropriate experiences such as problem-solving, imagination, cognitive challenges, social interactions, motor skills development, emotional exploration, and making different choices. Featuring all-new case studies, vignettes, and projects, as well as an expanded focus on teaching coding as a new literacy, this second edition helps you learn how to integrate coding into different curricular areas to promote literacy, math, science, engineering, and the arts through a project-based approach and a positive attitude to learning.
Download or read book Last Witnesses written by Svetlana Alexievich and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A masterpiece” (The Guardian) from the Nobel Prize–winning writer, an oral history of children’s experiences in World War II across Russia NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions . . . a history of the soul.” Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded—a trauma that would change the course of the Russian nation. Collectively, this symphony of children’s stories, filled with the everyday details of life in combat, reveals an altogether unprecedented view of the war. Alexievich gives voice to those whose memories have been lost in the official narratives, uncovering a powerful, hidden history from the personal and private experiences of individuals. Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Last Witnesses is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the twentieth century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war. Praise for Last Witnesses “There is a special sort of clear-eyed humility to [Alexievich’s] reporting.”—The Guardian “A bracing reminder of the enduring power of the written word to testify to pain like no other medium. . . . Children survive, they grow up, and they do not forget. They are the first and last witnesses.”—The New Republic “A profound triumph.”—The Big Issue “[Alexievich] excavates and briefly gives prominence to demolished lives and eradicated communities. . . . It is impossible not to turn the page, impossible not to wonder whom we next might meet, impossible not to think differently about children caught in conflict.”—The Washington Post
Download or read book Computer Science written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2004-10-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computer Science: Reflections on the Field, Reflections from the Field provides a concise characterization of key ideas that lie at the core of computer science (CS) research. The book offers a description of CS research recognizing the richness and diversity of the field. It brings together two dozen essays on diverse aspects of CS research, their motivation and results. By describing in accessible form computer science's intellectual character, and by conveying a sense of its vibrancy through a set of examples, the book aims to prepare readers for what the future might hold and help to inspire CS researchers in its creation.
Download or read book How to Code a Sandcastle written by Josh Funk and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the computer science nonprofit Girls Who Code comes this lively and funny story introducing kids to computer coding concepts. All summer, Pearl has been trying to build the perfect sandcastle, but out-of-control Frisbees and mischievous puppies keep getting in the way! Pearl and her robot friend Pascal have one last chance, and this time, they’re going to use code to get the job done. Using fundamental computer coding concepts like sequences and loops, Pearl and Pascal are able to break down their sandcastle problem into small, manageable steps. If they can create working code, this could turn out to be the best beach day ever! With renowned computer science nonprofit Girls Who Code, Josh Funk and Sara Palacios use humor, relatable situations, and bright artwork to introduce kids to the fun of coding.
