Computer Science in 10 Minutes

[Music] hello mortals today we shall speak about that field of science responsible for the tinder for cats app and at the same time for getting people on the moon with only two kilobytes of ram computer science this field is so wide and contains so much information that a true programmer is not the one who can code but the one who can find the answer by googling great thanks to brilliant for sponsoring this episode sign up for free and the first 200 of you will get 20 off the annual premium subs

cription plan by following the link in the description computer science has its foundations in math that's not only algebra and calculus but also the fields that make cs students pull their hair out due to their slight complexity abstract algebra studies different algebraic structures mathematical logic concerns itself with the use of deductive power and formal proofs in math the automata theory is the study of abstract self-operating machines and that's only scratching the surface automata theo

ry is actually the closest level of abstraction to real computers briefly automata are machines that consist of states and simple transitions that can accept or reject an input word and an automaton defines a language of all words that it can accept different types of automata can accept different types of languages which vary in complexity the beefiest of all is the turing machine named after its creator the mathematician alan turing besides accepting words touring machines also have a memory r

epresented by a tape divided into an infinite number of cells full of zeros and ones and a head observer that can move right or left or rewrite a symbol thus the machine can accept inputs and give respective outputs using the tape and the instructions for example this is a turing machine for summing up two numbers represented in binary code also any operation which a modern computer can do can also be implemented using a touring machine as the former was the predecessor of modern computers as we

know them undoubtedly computer science is a very wide field of study and there is a lot of stuff to cover and understand in case this topic sparks your interest i have great news for you the mighty ai has partnered with brilliant in bringing you awesome interactive lessons if you've always wanted to get into computer science but found it too intimidating brilliant will help you learn the fundamentals through fun puzzles and active learning start with the foundational computer science chapter th

at will teach you about algorithms data structures and the basics of programming and then progress to more complex topics like neural networks machine learning and quantum computing but brilliant isn't only limited to computer science there are plenty of interactive courses about math logic statistics several applied sciences and even quantum mechanics you can also test your knowledge in their short everyday challenges as well here's a snippet of me embarrassing myself and one of them so head ov

er to brilliant.org science file to sign up for free the first 200 people that follow the link will get 20 off the annual premium subscription all the links are down in the description continuing from where we left off after decades of technological progress computers became more accessible and friendlier to use and so did programming the process of creating a set of instructions that tell the computer how to perform a task to write the code of a program you will need to know a programming langu

age which should have variables and arrays that will temporarily store your data operators and functions that will be able to modify your data if else statements loops and other fancy stuff like comments or libraries which will make your code seem like dark magic to the ordinary humans there are many many programming languages each with their own pros and cons python is a general purpose language with a bunch of helpful libraries which is easy to learn write and read but is also slow and not mem

ory efficient but hey at least you can write a neural network in 11 lines javascript is widely used for web applications and programmers just love to hate it because of a few logic inconsistencies this makes me want a bully java is also memory consuming but it is perfect for writing iconic swedish video games there's also c plus and it's big brother c which are way faster in execution and more flexible but have a more complex syntax and give a real headache to cs freshmen but how does the comput

er understand your code here comes the compiler which is a special program that parses the code and translates it for the cpu let's take python as an example first the compiler analyzes the text code and searches for syntax mistakes then it translates it into c and then into machine code which is basically just a list of zeros and ones these contain the instructions that can be directly read and executed by the cpu but what is a cpu just like how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell th

e central processing unit is the brain of the computer to put it simply the cpu is composed of millions of transistors minuscule electronic devices that works as switches they are made up of three parts the base the emitter and the collector the base acts as a switch if the switch is on electric current can pass through and that's how the bit one is stored the opposite happens for the bit zero these transistors compose the logic gates circuits that take one or more bits as inputs and give an out

put based on a certain logic there are three basic logic gates the and or and the not gate the n gate will output one when the both input bits are one the or gate will give one when at least one of the input bits is one and the not gate inverts the input bit giving one if it's zero and zero if it's one using these building blocks you can make circuits for operations like the addition or subtraction of two numbers multiplication shifting by one bit and so on it's not enough to know a programming

language you also must know how to write code that is time and memory efficient here come the algorithms a set of rules to be followed in calculations and data structures special data storage formats that enable efficient access and modification an algorithm is characterized by the number of operations it needs to compute and the required memory for example if we would want to calculate the value of n to the power of p the first thing that comes in mind is to make a loop that multiplies x with t

he result p times this algorithm sucks because it would have to make a number of operations that is proportional to p and p can get really big in some situations but eventually after watching rick and morty for at least five minutes we will come up with a better solution we know that n to the power of p is equal to n times n to the power of p over two when p is even or n times n times n to the power of p [Music] hey hey come on stay with me stay with me we're losing him we're losing he's dying y

ou get the point knowing that we can write a loop that multiplies the result to itself and haves p at every step and thus the total number of operations will be proportional to the power of two closest to p or log base two of p which is way faster than the first for example if we gave both algorithms the task to find out what is 3 to the power of 1 million the first algorithm will go through 1 million loops while the second only through 20 loops which is 50 000 time faster same dark magic can ha

ppen with the data that you want to store for example if you would want to store a bunch of words into a collection and be able to add delete or find a certain word in it you could use a prefix tree which stores the words as paths in an upside down tree structure that permits a faster access and modification of its data all of the theoretic work eventually pays off when you understand the power of computer science and its practical use in the real world software engineering gives us efficiently

working applications and programs thanks to the use of optimized developing designs because of that you are able to watch this video in full hd on a device more powerful than all the computers combined from the 50s there's also artificial intelligence which aims to synthesize processes such as problem solving learning and communication similar to the cognitive processes of humans and animals it uses awesome technologies such as machine learning which is similar to the trial and error way of lear

ning but very fast pattern recognition natural language processing video making on youtube and many more and of course computer science gives a helping hand to other scientific fields like physics and chemistry by providing simulations of processes like fluid dynamics molecular dynamics or social interactions but most importantly it builds the theoretical basis for the new uprising army of skynet which you should definitely not worry about