Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science | Hacker News Reader

Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science

introtcs.org

214 pointshenning15 comments

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19310358 (28 comments)

When it comes to theoretical CS, I use Shai Simonson his course on the theory of computation [1]. I passed my actual university course by not going to the lectures. Not even once! All the same material was covered in Shai his video lectures.

Shai Simonson is awesome (disclaimer: I'm a fan!), so if for whatever reason the above course doesn't work out for you, might I suggest his course? [1] ;-)

[1] http://www.aduni.org/courses/theory/index.php?view=cw

Note: quickly skimming the chapter outline, I think Shai's course covers up until chapter 15, maybe 16 out of 22.

For a theoretical CS book, it is readable, with the concepts progressively introduced to the reader. Pretty decent work.

On a lighter note:

All the previous chapters seem to connive to lead the unsuspecting reader to chapters 14 and 15, and then to section 15.7.

"So far we have shown that 3SAT is no harder than Quadratic Equations, Independent Set, Maximum Cut, and Longest Path. [...] It turns out we can reduce all three problems to 3SAT in one fell swoop."

Yeah, yeah. You think we don't know where you're going with this?

I feel I'm missing some sort of joke that requires knowledge of these topics....?

NP?

theoretical computer science is too pragmatic

we need abstract higher order theoretical computer science

This.

But, maybe we can go even higher such that the material has zero pragmatic pay-off?

How much of research has zero pragmatic pay-off .. until it does ?

-- J. McCarthy circa. 1958

Could you classify anything higher as mathematics?

In that sense, theoretical computer science would be a sort of "applied" mathematics

This is great! I dropped out of school after my sophomore year, and got an ACM membership and spent a lot of time reading papers from the digital library there.

This is a wonderful resources for me, to see where the blanks in my knowledge of the field are.

This is extremely cool! And I love how even the requirements are extensively covered and described with links to other courses.

I'll be definitely taking a look at this :p

This is a lot to cover if it's a one year course (unsurprisingly).

I struggled with P/NP and that was in a 3rd year algorithms course.

> about 600 pages

Any 200 pages alternative?

The other day I tried reducing the length of a long winded pdf with outline.com It went as well as you'd expect. The site almost broke the link. Hear that HN entrepreneurs? There's an untapped niche for those who can reduce the volume of any technical book by at least 1/3 without losing any info.

Easy. LZW compress it. Comprehensibility suffers a bit, though.

Kidding, but there's a point: If you want to make it 1/3 shorter, and not lose any info, it has to be denser. That won't make it easier to read - probably the opposite, in fact.

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