My Week with Marilyn (2011) - full transcript

>> [MUSIC PLAYING]

>> [MUSIC PLAYING]

DAVID MALAN: All right.

This is CS50.

[MUSIC PLAYING Tritonal, Cash Cash, "Untouchable"]

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SPEAKER 1: I'm going to France, and you're going, too.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DAVID MALAN: This is CS50, Harvard University's introduction

to the intellectual enterprises of computer science

and the arts of program-- and for the first time in history,



Yale University's as well.

Indeed, whether you're here in Cambridge or in New Haven or Miami or St. Louis

or Amsterdam or anywhere around the world

taking CS50, computer science E50, CS50X, CS50 AP,

we are all one and the same.

Welcome to CS50.

>> What we have--

>> [APPLAUSE]

>> [LAUGHS]

>> [APPLAUSE]

>> So I made a mistake myself some time ago when I started off college.

And I got to college, and I decided to frankly, stick within my comfort zone.

I ended up declaring a concentration, or a major, of government.

Ant that was mostly a function of me being pretty familiar with government



or at least history or I really liked constitutional law in high school.

And so when I got here, I kind of gravitated toward things

with which I was already familiar.

Right?

God forbid I do poorly in the class.

I certainly wanted to stay within my comfort zone,

and it wasn't until sophomore year that I finally

got up the nerve to step foot in a classroom called CS50.

And at that point, did I finally realize that, my God, homework could actually

be fun.

>> Indeed, I was one of those kids that on Friday evenings when

the P-SETS would be released, I would go back to my room and dive

into the night's P-SETS.

And for me, that was a sign that this was a field for me.

But what was more important was the fact that I did get up this nerve

to explore waters unfamiliar to me and get beyond my own comfort zone

and frankly, I only was able to do that sophomore year by taking this class

pass/fail.

>> Indeed, it was the very last day that I finally switched over and finally

declared CS as my concentration, putting gov at that point behind me.

And so we're not setting out in this course to turn all of you

into CS majors or concentrators, but rather to give you an opportunity

to hopefully go beyond the world with which you're currently familiar

and bring back from this world skills and knowledge and savvy

that you can apply to your own world, whether that's

in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, or beyond.

>> Indeed, if you're feeling a little intrepid

about being in this room let alone in this class,

realize that if history is any indication, 72% of you

have never taken a CS course before.

So it is by all means not the case that the student sitting to the left

or to the right or in front or behind you knows far more about CS

or programming in particular than you.

That's not in fact the case.

And indeed, much of the support structure

that we've set up in this course over the past many years

has been for exactly that reason-- to provide an on ramp that still exits

just as rigorously and just as high as ever--

but the slope of which allow students less comfortable and more comfortable

alike to succeed irrespective of his or her prior background.

>> Indeed, what ultimately matters in this class is not

so much where you end up relative to your classmates

but where you in week 12 end up relative to yourself

in week zero, which is where we are here today.

>> Indeed and this may very well and probably does look like Greek

to many of you.

But rest assured, that this and so much more

is going to be completely within your grasp in just a little bit of time.

>> But today, we focus on some of the higher level ideas

to give you a taste of CS50 and computer science

in a sense of what you're signing up for.

And indeed, computer science might be distilled more

simply as computational thinking-- thinking like a computer, if you will.

And there's so many different things ingredients that go into that,

but let's propose just three for today.

If the goal of the class ultimately is not to teach you programming,

is not to teach you C or PHP or SQL or any number of the words

and acronyms in the course's description,

but rather to teach you to solve problems more effectively

and to think more methodically and more algorithmically, so to speak.

Let's see what exactly this means.

>> So I would propose that thinking computationally boils down

to solving problems.

What do you need to solve a problem?

You need to input-- like the input to the problem--

you need an output, which is hopefully the solution,

and then you need a process by which to solve that problem, which

we'll call an algorithm-- a set of instructions for solving some problem.

>> But first, let's focus on the first and the last of these inputs and outputs.

Computers after all, apparently only understands zeros and ones.

But how can that possibly be?

Even if you're not familiar at all with what's underneath the hood,

you probably at least heard that computers understand binary--

just zeros and ones-- but how can you possibly do anything interesting?

>> Well, one of the themes of the class is going

to be this layering-- where today, we'll take a quick glance at the lowest level

details, but with each passing day, where we layer

or abstract on top of those details to actually solve higher level

problems of interest to us.

>> So here is what we might call binary-- with just an alphabet of 0 and 1.

But we humans are mostly familiar with decimal.

Dec meaning 10.

Bi meaning two.

And so in the decimal system, we have 10 digits

at our disposal-- of course, zero through nine.

So if you look at a number like this, most of you

intuitively just grasp that is 123.

There's nothing really hard about that.

But why is it 123?

Well, if you think back to grade school-- or at least

the way I learned this kind of world-- you

might recall that we treated these things in columns, or places.

>> So we have the ones place on the right.

The tens place in the middle.

The hundreds place on the left.

And then how do we get from this pattern symbols--

1 2 3-- to this higher level idea that we know as 123?

Well, it's just some simple arithmetic.

Right?

>> The one there is essentially means give us 100 times 1 plus 10 times

2 plus 1 times 3.

And of course if we do out the math there, it's 100 plus 20

plus 3-- otherwise known as 123.

>> So if you're on the same page as that right

now and are comfortable with the so-called decimal system as a human,

it's actually well within your scope of comfort

to consider now the binary system.

Take a wild guess-- this represents, in the world of computers

in binary-- what number?

Zero.

>> But why is that?

Well, it turns out that the columns or places here-- they're not powers of 10.

1, 10, 100, 1,000, and so forth.

They're instead, quite simply, powers of 2.

So, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on.

And so now we of course get to 0 here simply because we have 4 times

0 plus 2 times 0 plus 1 times 0, which of course gives us 0.

>> But how do I go about representing the number 1?

What's the pattern of zeros and ones to represent

the number we humans know as 1?

001.

And 2?

010.

>> And now the pattern starts to repeats.

Now it's 011.

And again, 0 fours, one 2, one 1.

So 2 plus 1.

That's 3.

>> And now to represent 4, we don't just change that 0 to a 1.

You sort of have to carry, so to speak, and the numbers

start flipping around just like in the decimal world.

>> So this is 4.

This is 5.

This is 6.

This is 7.

And so we've counted as high as 7.

>> Now all we just need is more a bits-- more zero's and one's.

And indeed "bits", if you've heard this term-- binary digit.

Bit is where that comes from.

And so if we want to represent bigger numbers, we need more bits.

But let's move away from slides now to something a little more real.

Suppose that we want to actually represent this thing.

>> Well let's take a look now at a little demonstration.

So this is a web based application that one of CS50's own, Michael G,

put together this summer to help us elucidate exactly this idea.

And would someone like to venture up on stage

in front of all his or her classmates?

Right there in front.

Come on up.

>> You have to be comfortable on camera and the internet.

Oh, right here.

OK.

We're OK.

All right.

Come on up.

What's your name?

Emily come on up.

So this is Emily.

What year are you?

>> Freshman.

>> Emily, nice to meet you.

David.

>> All right.

So up on the screen here, we have this touch screen

which is going to allow us to actually interact with this program,

and it's just a browser.

It's Chrome full screened at the moment, but it's

been programmed by Michael to respond in a way that allows

us to play around with binary digits.

>> So for instance, here we have not three but eight bits-- zeros and ones.

Right now, we're looking at the number 0.

And indeed, all eight zeros in decimal means zero.

So that's all that's being hinted at here.

>> So if you wanted to represent the number 8,

what's the pattern of zeros and ones that you want?

You can simply tap up or down or the numbers themselves.

All right.

So that of course is 8, as you can see up there.

And if we wanted to do 16, what do we do?

>> Yep, just touch it again.

16.

All right.

So this is all fine and good, it's still very low level.

We need a way in the real world for Emily

of actually representing these things.

And so suppose that we turn these zeros and ones, which is very

conceptual, into actual light bulbs.

Right?

>> A computer is a physical, mechanical, electrical device.

And its input-- at least if you plug it in or charge it--

is to have battery power and electrons flowing in and out.

>> So now, why don't we stop thinking about bits as zeros and ones,

but something more physical like light bulbs here.

And if Dan Armendariz could join me for just a moment-- come on up--

we're going to queue up an application.

>> Come on over, Emily.

Sorry this is the most awkward demo for you ever.

Come on over here.

We're going to queue up with thanks to Dan

Armendariz, another member of our staff, an application known as binary bulb.

>> So what we have here is an iPad application

that has the following user interface on the screen for Emily.

It's just got the same exact UI essentially that's over there.

And if you now want to represent the number, say 8,

how would you go about doing this noticing at the right,

the light bulbs that we have here?

Ah-ha.

Magical.

So if we want to now turn this into something a little more challenging,

and let's go ahead and pick a random number like the number 50 here.

Input this.

And if you can now be challenged to come up with the number 50,

we'll have a fabulous prize for you.

>> EMILY: OK.

Oh my God.

DAVID MALAN: Arithmetic is indeed hard in front

of hundreds of your classmates.

But 50 has been the answer here.

>> [APPLAUSE]

>> And so now, this is meant to be demonstrative for Emily.

So, in here, is some light bulbs quite like these,

but it's actually the little magnetic strips.

And what's cool about these and the reason we use them in CS50

is that they support something called an API-- an application programming

interface, which is just a fancy way of saying that what one of our staff

did over the summer was create an iPad application here

that talks over the internet to the light bulbs over here,

which are wirelessly connected to another device.

But this is now an option for final projects.

And so Emily, if you would so like, at the end of the term,

you can adorn your dorm room in the meantime with those.

Thank you to Emily as well.

>> [APPLAUSE]

>> But now, let's turn our attention to what

that message might have looked like, and it's a little something like this.

In fact, this is an example just as a teaser

of what's to come of what's called an API request.

And so what we have here is simply exactly the kinds of message

that after a few weeks time in CS50, you'll

be able to send to something fairly familiar like that to actually

turn them on and off.

But this is all fine and good.

Right?

We have the mental model hopefully for representing numbers with

zero's and one's.

And from zeros and ones, we can get to higher numbers like 50,

as Emily just did, or we can move up from that.

And I claim that we can represent things like letters as well.

Right?

>> Computers are far more interesting than just numbers.

And so how do you go about representing words

on the screen or emails or essays or the like?

Well, it turns out that computers simply abstract on top of these low level

details, and humans some time ago, came up with an arbitrary, but a consistent,

mapping of numbers to letters-- so that any time you see a capital letter

A on your computer screen, odds are what's

underneath the hood is a pattern of zeros and ones

that represent the number, per this chart, 65.

>> And more physically inside of your computer,

are millions of things called transistors-- these days-- which

are just switches if you will, things that can go on and off and so imagine.

Not eight of these large light bulbs but millions of these tiny little light

bulbs, or switches or transistors, that can turn on and off

based on how you program them.

And so now we have a way of representing letters as well.

>> In fact, if I were to use this mapping here and try to actually

spell something out, we might look at this pattern of decimal digits

right now.

So we're not going to even focus on binary anymore.

Let's just consider these as decimal number 72, 73, 33.

But what might this represent?

Anyone have a sufficiently photographic memory

to know what's spelled on the screen here?

Yeah a few.

So hi.

H-I and then an exclamation point, which was not actually on the screen.

But indeed there's a mapping for every letter to every number

that you might want to type on your keyboard.

>> But numbers don't have to represent just letters.

Right?

All of us know about images and photographs and audio files

and video files and the like.

So clearly we can represent higher level things still.

And so what a computer does is simply choose

to interpret patterns of zero ones differently based on the context.

>> If you double click a Microsoft Word icon,

you see words on the screen instead of colors and pictures

because word knows that this is an essay that you've actually typed.

If you instead double click on a JPEG or a GIF or a PNG,

it opens up and is an image because the .PNG or the .docx or whatever the file

extension is and whatever software you're using knows to interpret

a pattern of zeros and ones differently based on what its purpose in life is.

>> So for instance, this same sequence of numbers

might represent how much red do you want, how much green do you want,

and how much blue do you want.

And indeed, if you've ever heard RGB-- so just red green blue.

And so if I see numbers like, this give me 72 red, give me 73 green,

and 33 blue, this is how a computer using three bytes-- where

a byte is eight bits or 24 bits-- would represent a pretty nasty shade

of brown or yellow here.

And in different contexts, could those exact same patterns in zeros and ones

mean something completely different as well.

>> So we have now a way of representing information-- zeros and ones.

On top of that, we get letters.

On top of that, we might get colors.

And let's assume for today that we can get audio and video

and things so much more sophisticated than that.

>> But now let's consider how we use those inputs

and produce those outputs now that we have

a way of representing that information.

Well, we need something called an algorithm.

Again, a set of instructions for solving some problem

step by step-- and the more precise, the better.

>> And so an example with which humans are admittedly less familiar these days,

but nonetheless is still with us in software,

is the process of looking up someone in a phone book.

>> Now, fewer and fewer folks know each year what this relic actually is here.

But back in my day, this was a phone book

with thousands of pages and numbers and people's names from A through Z.

And even though we're kind of cheating a bit-- this is mostly yellow pages.

There were also white pages at the time, which

had all of those names and numbers of actual human beings.

>> And if I wanted to look someone up in a phone book like this today, of course,

I just type in the first few characters of his or her name,

and my phone finds that information.

But the process by which your iPhone or Android phone

or whatever is actually finding someone in your contacts list

is identical to what we humans probably have done for some time.

>> Now I could take this problem, if you will,

and the inputs here are not zeros and ones.

They're pages-- like, let's say 1,000 pages.

And if I wanted to look up someone like Mike Smith in this phone book,

I could start at the beginning and see that I'm in the A section

and then turn one page at a time, looking and looking

as I make to the B's and the C's and the D's and so forth for Mike Smith.

Smith starting with an S, I'll hopefully eventually find him.

>> Is this algorithm-- that process-- correct?

Yeah.

It's correct.

I will find Mike if he's in here, but what's the caveat that you might offer.

It's slow.

Right?

I know Mike S is sort of toward the latter half of the phone book.

Why the heck am I starting at the beginning

and going page by page by page.

So of course, I could flip it around and start from the back,

but that's going to get me there at the same rate,

if you willl-- page after page after page.

And it's not going to work if I want to search for someone else whose

name comes earlier in the alphabet.

>> So what if I do what I learned in grade school,

again, do things not by ones but by twos.

So 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and so forth.

Is that correct?

No.

It's kind of correct.

But some of you who murmured no, where is the problem, or the bug,

the mistake so to speak.

Yeah.

>> STUDENT: You might skip over the right entry.

>> DAVID MALAN: Yeah.

I might skip over Mike Smith is because I've taken two pages at once

and he just happens to be sandwiched between those two pages.

I might realize that I'm on to the T section

not having found Mike Smith yet.

>> And so what might the fixed there be?

Well, if I do hit the Ts in the phone book,

I might need to double back one or so page.

So it's fixable, but it's not quite as simple

as just going by two to speed up my performance.

But what?

Come on.

What is what most humans are going to do with this kind of phone book?

You're given the phone book.

What do you do?

>> What's that?

Go to the middle.

So I heard go to the middle, and I find myself roughly in the M section,

so to speak.

And now what do I want to do?

Good job.

What's your name?

>> JAMES: James.

>> DAVID MALAN: James, all right.

What do I do next?

JAMES: You go in the half that has the S's.

DAVID MALAN: All right.

I'm going to go into the half that has the S's in it because, again,

a stipulation here was that this thing is sorted.

It's a pretty useless 1,000 pages if Verizon doesn't actually

sort these things for us A through Z.

So if I know Mike is probably in the latter half of the phone book,

I can now.

>> [LAUGHS]

>> Tear the problem in half.

>> [APPLAUSE]

Thank you.

Tear the problem in half.

That was actually real-- that struggle.

So tear the phone book in half, leaving myself

with fundamentally the same problem.

But of course, half as large.

And if I follow James's advice again, and I go here.

I say, oh now I'm in the T section.

>> And so of course, I can tear the phone book

in half one more time, leaving me with a problem that's

now a quarter of the size.

So I've gone from 1,000 to 500 to 250 to 125 and so forth.

It feels like I'm taking bigger bites out

of this problem with each iteration, or each step in it.

>> And indeed, the time I'm going to spend finding Mike Smith in this example

is so much less because eventually I'm going to whittle this pone book down

to just one lone page.

And if Mike is on that page, I'm going to go ahead and give him

a call having found him.

>> But just how much better is that algorithm--

that dare say intuitive algorithm-- than the ones we

started with which we're very linear-- left to right-- at a pace of 1 or 2x?

>> Well, let's plot this.

We don't have to worry too much about math or numbers in this case here.

We just look at a plot.

So on the x, or horizontal axis, is the size of the problem--

how many pages are there.

On the y, or the vertical axis, is how much time

is it going to take me to solve it.

And maybe that's how many page turns, how many seconds,

how many-- some unit of measures.

>> And I've drawn a red straight lines here because if each additional page

of the phone book, I require to make one additional step.

So if Verizon adds one more page next year,

I might have to flip one more page to find someone like Mike Smith.

>> Meanwhile, the second algorithm, which I went by twos, is the same shape.

It's still very linear, very left to right, taking equal bytes each time,

but the slope is a little lower.

>> For instance, if the size of the problem were roughly here

and I used my first algorithm, I might end up all the way

at the top of that red line.

But if I instead use to twosies approach,

the yellow line suggests because it's lower,

that it's going to take me less time the solve.

>> But what's the shape of the third algorithm-- again, arguably

the most intuitive algorithm?

Well, it looks a little something like this.

It's curved, or logarithmic, in shape.

And even though it never kind of flattens out,

it asymptotically inches up and up and up but terribly slowly

versus everything else.

And what's the take away?

Well, we call it log n.

But what does that actually mean?

Well if Verizon doubled the number of pages in the phone book

next year from 1,000 to 2,000.

How many more steps is my first algorithm going to take?

>> My first algorithm.

Maybe 1,000 more steps.

If they doubled the phone book, I'm going

to have to flip through another 1,000 pages to find Mike.

Of course, if the second algorithm, maybe 500 because I'm

going twice as fast.

>> But if Verizon doubles the number of pages between this year and next,

with my third algorithm-- the divide and conquer that James proposed,

going in half and half and half-- how many more steps will

it take me next year to have a phone book of a size 2,000?

Just one.

Because with one bite, I can take, out of that problem, half of the pages

away.

And if you think about this a little crazily now-- if the phone book doesn't

have 1,000 or 2000 page, but let's say 4 billion pages--

it's a big phone book-- how many times or how many steps

is it going to take me to find Mike Smith in the phone book

with 4 billion pages.

You can sort of start to do the math.

All right.

4 billion divided by 2.

So that's 2 billion divided by 1.

That's 1 billion.

Then half a billion.

Then 250-- so you can do this again and again but not that many times before

you get to one page.

>> And indeed, even if the phone book is 4 billion pages long

or the database you're searching is 4 billion records long,

it's going to take you give or take 32 steps only to find Mike Smith.

And if you double the phone book next year from 4 billion to 8 billion,

33 steps instead of just 32.

>> And this is testament to one of the ideas

that we might embrace in computer science more generally, which

is this computational thinking and approaching a problem

frankly using tools from your already familiar tool

kit-- your real world with which you're familiar,

but harnessing those ideas to actually solve problems.

>> But we need to formalize our solutions to these problems.

And so let me introduce for a moment something we might call pseudocode.

Much of the semester, we'll spend using actual code in languages like C and PHP

and JavaScript and SQL and the like.

>> But for now, let's just look at something fairly intuitive

like English.

I might distill that algorithm with which

I found Mike into steps like this.

>> Pick up the phone book

>> Open to middle of phone book

Look at the name's

If Mike is among the name's

Call Mike

Else if Smith is earlier in the book

Open to the middle of the left half of the book

Else go to line 3

Else if Smith is later in the book

Open to the middle of the right half of the book

Go to line three

Else

Give up

And there's a few characteristics now of this that are worth pointing out.

So one, all the lines I've highlighted in yellow

we're going to start calling statements or functions or procedures.

They're just actions do this, and there's not

all that much variability to it.

>> Next step here though, are these conditions-- if, else, else if, else.

And these are called conditions, or branches, and they're decision points.

And they allow us to do something conditionally.

>> And in fact, let's take a quick look at perhaps a familiar face--

we'll call him Bill-- and exactly what these conditions,

how these might be used.

>> BILL GATES: People make decisions every day.

For example, before you go outside you kind of have an if statement that says,

if it's raining, then I need to get my jacket.

>> And computers are amazing once you decide those kinds of statements

that they can reliably execute those things at unbelievable speed.

And so a computer program really is a little bit of math and some

if statements where the decision gets made.

>> DAVID MALAN: So now let's focus on a few different lines--

the ones I've highlighted in yellow here.

And it turns out there's different ways of expressing this idea.

But intuitively what our lines 8 and 11 that I've highlighted here telling you

to do?

Yes, go to line 3, but what behavior is that really inducing?

It's some kind of loop or cycle, and you can kind of see it.

Right?

If on line 8, you go back to line 3, and then you hit line 8 again,

you might go back to line 3, back to line 3, back to line 3.

There's this sort of cycle or loop.

And indeed, that's induced in line 11 potentially as well.

And this is a basic programming construct as well.

>> You might not want to just do something with a statement

or do something conditionally with a condition or branch.

You might want to do something cyclically with a loop.

And we'll have someone else with whom you might be familiar-- we'll call him

Mark-- explain this concept here.

MARK ZUCKERBERG: One thing that computers are

really good at is repeating commands.

As a person, you'd get really bored if you

had to do the same thing lots of times in a row,

but a computer can do the same thing millions or even billions of times

and not get bored and be able to carry that out really well.

>> So for example, if I want to wish everyone

on Facebook a happy birthday by sending them an email,

it might take me more than a century to actually write out

all of those emails to everyone.

But with just a few lines of code, I can have a system send an email to everyone

on Facebook wishing them a happy birthday.

>> So that's what loops are and why they're valuable and something

that computers can do very well.

And just last week, you might have seen that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

posted this announcement, which is that they just

have passed an important milestone for the first time ever.

1 billion people used Facebook in a single day, specifically last Monday.

One in seven humans on Earth apparently logged into Facebook.

>> Well, this seems a good opportunity to look back on where Facebook began,

and we went through CS50's own archives because it turns out in 2005,

Mark gave a guest lecture in CS50.

You'll see that production values weren't quite the same back then

in terms of the technology available, and you'll also

see that the presence of this guest lecture

didn't necessarily pique the interest of the student body, your predecessors,

as much as it might have just a few years later.

>> So let's take a look at Science Center C.

SPEAKER 2: Please join me, and welcome.

[APPLAUSE]

MARK ZUCKERBERG: Yo.

All right.

Cool this is the first time I've ever have had to hold one of these things.

So I'm just going to attach it really quickly.

All right.

Can you hear it?

Is this good?

Is this amplified at all?

All right.

Sweet.

So, this is like one of the first times I've been to a lecture at Harvard,

but--

>> DAVID MALAN: So eventually the Science Center did zoom in on the video,

but not before capturing this excerpt where Mark's talking,

which he discussed his roommate, Dustin, who

and realized that Mark is about to mention to programming languages--

one called Pearl, one called PHP-- as he discusses

the origins of Dustin's contribution.

MARK ZUCKERBERG: I started running the site

and launched it at Harvard in February, 2004.

So I guess almost two years ago now.

And within a couple of weeks, a few thousand people had signed up,

and we started getting some emails from people at other colleges asking

for us to launch it at their schools.

>> And I was taking 161 at the time.

So I don't know if you guys know the reputation of that course,

but it was kind of heavy.

It was a really fun course, but it didn't leave me with much time

to do anything else with Facebook.

So my roommate Dustin, who I guess had just finished CS50, was like, hey.

I want to help out.

I want to do the expansion and help you figure out how to do the stuff.

>> So I was like, that's pretty cool, dude.

But you don't really know any PHP or anything like that.

So that weekend he went home, bought the book Pearl for Dummies,

came back and was like, all right.

I'm ready to go.

>> I was like, dude, the site's written in PHP not Pearl, but that's cool.

>> So he picked up PHP over like a few days because I

promise that if you have a good background in C,

PHP is a very simple thing to pick up.

And he just kind of went to work.

>> Before we take a look now at where the course is going,

allow me to invite just some of SC50's staff up on to stage.

Some of them are shopping their own courses.

But if those TFs and CAs and course heads who are here could come on up

and join me for a quick hello.

>> Allow me to introduce in particular, Hanna, Maria, Daven, and Rob,

CS50's course heads here in Cambridge.

>> [APPLAUSE]

>> DAVID MALAN: Indeed, testament to the support structure that the course has

built out over the past many years, CS50 staff this year numbers nearly 100,

and that's here in Cambridge alone.

Meanwhile, in New Haven, are there some 40 TFs and CAs and staff members there

to run the course as well.

>> Allow us to introduce first, Rob Bowden.

ROB BOWDEN: Hi.

I'm Rob.

This is my sixth year TFing in the course.

So, all the way back in my freshman year, I did not take CS50.

Your freshman fall-- you might be familiar

that you can only take four courses and there are so many courses today.

So I'm like, eh.

I took AP CS my senior year of high school it was horrible.

So, I'm like, eh.

Computer science is not for me.

>> So then it was over the course of my freshman

fall, that I had a friend in CS50, and I think I attended one lecture with her.

It's like, oh, this is kind of better than what I had in high school.

>> And over the course of the year, I had my own problem sets

in the courses I was actually taking.

But I found that whenever I wanted to procrastinate on those,

I would go back to CS50 and look at some of that stuff.

So, yeah.

I'm cool.

I procrastination with coding.

So then it's at the end of the fall that I realize, hey,

computer science is pretty cool.

I end up taking CS51.

In the next semester, I end up taking CS61.

And it all from there, then I end up declaring

computer science, which I had absolutely no intention of doing

when I came into college.

And now I'm here.

So the course is what you make of it.

I hope you enjoy it.

>> [APPLAUSE]

DAVID MALAN: Thank you to Rob.

>> And now Maria, our head course assistant.

>> MARIA: Hey guys.

My name is Maria.

I'm a sophomore in Cabot House, coming from Bulgaria,

and I'm super excited to be part of the staff this year.

I took CS50 as a freshman last year, and I never even

thought about CS beforehand.

So I absolutely love the course, and I hope you all love it as much as I did.

And, yeah.

Welcome to CS50.

DAVID MALAN: Thank you to Maria.

[APPLAUSE]

Now Hanna, our head teaching fellow.

HANNA: Hi, I'm Hanna.

I'm a senior in Cabot studying computer science.

I took CS50 as a freshman and had been TFing-- this'll be my third year.

So I will be happily involved in CS50 for all four years,

and I'm looking forward to working with you all.

DAVID MALAN: Thank you to Hanna.

[APPLAUSE]

And lastly, Daven, our precepter.

DAVEN: Hey guys.

I'm a precept over in computer science here.

This'll be my fourth year teaching.

I also help manage the course.

So I'm sure you'll see me around, especially at office hours.

I'm always at office hours.

So if you see me walking around, definitely come say hi.

I love to meet everybody.

Otherwise, have fun, and I'll see you around.

>> DAVID MALAN: Thank you to Daven as well.

So you'll meet all of these folks before long.

But without further ado, if you guys would

like to resume your seats from earlier.

Allow me to introduce from afar now some of our friends from New Haven,

in particular the course's heads who'll be overseeing CS50 there-- Professor

Brian Scassellati, Jason, and Andi, who just-- so that we didn't tempt fate

with any FaceTime or the like-- have just sent us minutes

ago the following video in which they say hello from lecture hall

at Yale, in which lecture is being streamed right now.

>> So our friends from Yale.

BRIAN SCASSELLATI: Hi, David.

Hi, everyone at Harvard.

We are so excited to be bringing CS50 to Yale this semester.

My name is Brian Scassellati, but everyone just calls me Scas.

And I'm here today to introduce to you the CS50 staff.

>> [CHEERING]

>> And more importantly, I'm here to introduce as well

all of the students at Yale who as of this morning

have made this the most popular course at Yale the CS50 students.

>> [CHEERING]

>> So we're very excited to be seeing you here

on Friday and on Saturday for Puzzle Day and have a great lecture.

Bye.

>> [APPLAUSE]

>> DAVID MALAN: On the screen here is the names of the some of 140 staff

members who await you over the course of the semester-- some of them

here in Cambridge, some of them here in New Haven.

And indeed you'll have an opportunity this Saturday,

as Scas notes, to attend CS50 Puzzle Day.

You might have seen little puzzle pieces slipped under your doorways recently.

We have a few extras here later on when you exist.

If you assemble all four puzzle pieces and merge forces with rooms

nearby yours in your house or dorm, they'll

assemble into a QR code-- or a two dimensional bar code, that

once assembled and scanned with your phone will lead you

to some fabulous prize or-- I suppose you could just photograph this now

as well.

>> But find those puzzle pieces nonetheless in order to win that fabulous prize.

And indeed one of the traditions in SC50-- ah, too slow.

One of the traditions in CS50 is to serve cake after the first lecture.

>> And so indeed, in a few minutes from now,

there will be cake served outside both here and New Haven as well.

>> But first-- we decorated them ourselves.

But first-- and hopefully there'll be enough.

>> But first, a quick look.

So lectures is indeed will be produced mostly here in Cambridge.

But each month, we'll hop down to Yale with CS50's production team and stream

the course in the reverse direction as well so

as to bring these two campuses truly for the first time in history

as close together as possible as one in the same course.

>> In terms of the support structure that's been stood up here in Cambridge as well

as in New Haven, are sections.

Indeed, as some of you may know, we have different tracks

within the course for those less comfortable, more comfortable,

and somewhere in between so that irrespective of your prior background,

can you ultimately succeed in the class.

>> Office hours meanwhile, are an opportunity on Mondays and Tuesdays

and Thursday evenings to work both here and in New Haven on our course's

problem sets with dozens of the course's staff near you.

>> Problem sets meanwhile, are supported by things we call

walkthroughs, which are video based tutorials that truly answering FAQ

of where to begin a week's challenge.

And postmortems walk you through possible solutions

so that the end of the problem set too, you

know exactly what you could have done differently or altogether otherwise.

>> The problem sets themselves come in two editions, a standard edition

that we expect and invite most of the class-- some 90% plus to do--

and a so-called hacker edition on which every page is emblazoned

hacker edition, hacker edition, hacker edition,

so that you have that karma if you will, for diving

into more advanced versions of the course's problem sets

that cover ostensibly the same material but with a more sophisticated approach

and with additional background sometimes introduced.

>> Meanwhile, are there nine late days that you can apply to the course's problem

sets as well as the lowest score, which we drop at the terms end.

>> But what awaits?

Well, a taste of the problem sets at hand on Friday

and next week where we dabble for just a few days in something

called Scratch, a graphical programming language developed by our friends

at MIT's Media Lab that allows you to program either for the first time

or in a new environment altogether using a drag and drop type environment.

Whereby puzzle pieces only interlock together

if it makes logical sense to do so.

>> Meanwhile in problem set two last year for instance,

did we introduce the class to the world of cryptography,

the art of encrypting or scrambling information.

Indeed, this text here if decrypted, will actually

lead you to some fun destination.

And in the problem set, what we had students

do is implement exactly those kinds of things-- an algorithm,

or set of instructions for scrambling and scrambling information.

>> And in the hacker edition of that same problem set,

did we challenge students to take a encrypted file from a typical computer

system with lots of usernames and encrypted passwords

and to crack those passwords-- actually figure out

what they were without knowing anything a priori about those actual passwords.

Meanwhile, do we transition in the problem

sets to then looking at the world of graphics.

And in fact, you might imagine now that this could perhaps

be the simplest way to represent a black and white image.

>> A white pixel, or square, as at top right there,

might be represented with a 1 and a black square

might be represented with a 0.

And just by using more bits like we proposed earlier with 72 and 73 and 33,

could we represent color pixels as well.

And what we do during this problem set is

generally take a stroll around campus with a digital camera,

take photographs of people, places, and things.

Then somehow every semester, we seem to accidentally

deleted or corrupt the memory card on which all of those photos are,

and so you are challenged to then write software

with which to recover those JPEGs from a copy of our camera's card.

>> Meanwhile, do we hand you later in the term a dictionary of English words

that have 143,000 words, and you need to come up

with a smart way of loading them into memory,

or RAM so to speak, to answer queries of the form: is this a word,

is this a word, implementing the fastest spell checker that you can,

even pinning yourself potentially against classmates

to see which of you uses the least amount of time

when running your code and even the least amount of memory.

>> Later in term do you actually implement your own web server.

So not just a website in a language called HTML and more,

but a web server that actually listens to requests on the internet

and responds to them.

And indeed, this is how we bridge our world of C with which you'll

become familiar next week and PHP and HTML and JavaScript

and CSS and the like.

>> Because one of the first web based project we do later in the term

is historically CS50 Finance.

while also writing code to talk to Yahoo Finance getting semi real time stock

quotes in order to update your own portfolio.

>> But lastly of course, is the final project--

an opportunity to do most anything of interest to you to solve a problem here

or beyond of interest to you that's somehow inspired

by the lessons learned in the class.

>> And the class, as you may know, culminates in so-called CS50 Hackathon

and CS50 Fair and any number of other cultural events

throughout the semester that allow you to engage

with each other and the course's staff.

>> For instance, at Fire and Ice in Sitar this year, well, on Friday afternoons,

we invite some 50 students to lunch, whoever

would like to join us, myself, and the staff,

and our friends from industry and alums to chat about life in the real world

and beyond while enjoying a good lunch.

At the Hackathon will you see such images

as these, including plenty of candy-- and as of 2014 for the first time--

vegetables.

>> [APPLAUSE]

>> But by 5:00 AM, does the scene usually look a little something like this.

And then just a week or so later, is the CS50 Fair

to which some 2000 plus students and staff and faculty

members from across campus and across campuses this year

come to see and delight in the accomplishments of CS50 students, which

is now you.

>> And indeed, while this year we'll be inviting and busing anyone

at at Yale who would like to come up to Cambridge this Saturday for CS50 Puzzle

Day, and we'll do the exact same thing in December for the CS50 Hackathon

so that Harvard and Yale students alike partake in both of these events.

>> We will also hold CS50 fairs in Cambridge and in New Haven this year

so that students on both campuses and staff and faculty

can see each respective campus's accomplishment.

And those accomplishments will induce such memory

as this and this and ultimately this, in which all of you

exit the class wearing a little something in which you were hopefully

happy or proud to say that I took CS50.

>> But before that and before we serve cake,

we've put together-- thanks to CS50's production team and a certain self

stick, the one occasion that we use such things for-- when we sent it

not only here to Cambridge but also to New Haven

to gather a few hellos from the course's staff and all of the folks

you will meet both here and in New Haven over the following months.

>> Allow me to introduce a few more of CS50's staff.

MARK ZUCKERBERG: Did that make it go?

Oh, it's going.

It's going.

Ooh.

Yarr!

>> [MUSIC PLAYING ANDY GRAMMER, "HONEY, I'M GOOD"]

>> MARY: This is Caitlin.

That's Jay, and I'm Mary.

SATO: Hi, guys.

I'm Sato.

MICHAEL G.: Hi.

My name is Michael, G.

DOUG LLOYD: I'm not.

No.

I'm Doug Lloyd.

I can't believe that I'm holding a selfie stick right now.

SPEAKER 4: Hi.

SPEAKER 5: Hi.

SPEAKER 6: Hello.

SPEAKER 7: Hi.

SPEAKER 8: Hey.

We're hanging out at Yale.

We're really excited for this semester because it's

the first time it's coming to Yale.

It's going to be awesome!

>> [MUSIC PLAYING]

>> JACOB SCHERBA: My name is Jacob Scherba.

I'm excited to teach CS50 because I think

it bring computer science to people in and approachable way.

SPEAKER 9: I'm really excited to teach CS50

because I took the class last year, and it's one of the best classes.

SPEAKER 10: Yeah.

My advice is you should take CS50.

JACOB SCHERBA: I chose CS because I think it's a fun and creative way

to solve problems in an analytical way.

SPEAKER 11: Back when I was a little freshman and afraid of computer science

and afraid of doing engineering and stuff,

it was the first hard class I took, and it was also my favorite class ever.

DOUG LLOYD: This is my ninth year teaching CS50.

That makes me sound so old!

There's always something new.

There's always something exciting.

There's always new challenges faced by new students, and it's fun to help them

and to experience those challenges with them

and help them solve their problems.

>> SPEAKER 12: When I first learned how to do CS,

it was like learning a super power.

And to see that in other students and to help them through that process

is one of the most rewarding things I've ever.

>> SPEAKER 7: I chose CS because in the beginning, I was a math concentrator

and I took CS50 and fell in love with it.

I also felt that with CS, I could build things.

And that, I thought, was a really cool aspect.

>> SPEAKER 13: Some advice for new students is go to office hours

and hang out with the awesome TFs.

SPEAKER 14: Start your P-SETs early, go to office hours,

become frends with your TF.

SPEAKER 15: Yeah.

Everything she said.

SPEAKER 16: Don't be afraid to ask for help.

SPEAKER 17: Yeah.

SPEAKER 18: Start your P-SETs early.

SPEAKER 19: It's a big social experience.

Make a lot of friends this way.

SPEAKER 14: Go to section It's fun.

SPEAKER 11: I mean, go for it.

It's really hard.

You'll get out of it what you put into it,

but it's a really fun class especially if you're

willing to put the time into it, but it helps if you put time into it.

You'll get a lot more out of it later on.

MIKE: I'm Mike.

CAMILLE: I'm Camille.

HANYA: I'm Hanya.

MATT: I'm Matt.

PETER: I am Peter.

PHILLIP: I'm Phillip.

PATRICK: I'm Patrick.

ROB BOWDEN: I'm Rob Bowden.

BRIAN SCASSELLATI: My name is Scas, and this--

ALL: --is CS50.

SPEAKER 20: At Yale.

SPEAKER 21: At Yale.

[LAUGHING]

DAVID MALAN: That's it for CS50.

We will see you from Yale on Friday, Puzzle Day on Saturday.

Cake is now served.

This is CS50.

>> [MUSIC PLAYING]