Computer Science 15-100, Fall 2008
Notes:  Bonus Lecture #1

How to turn a bucket of sand into a computer.
(Circuits, Architecture, Machine + Assembly Language, etc)

Logistics

1. Bonus points
   • 2 hours of bonus for attending the lecture
   • Up to 8 additional hours of bonus for the bonus projects listed below
     • Note that you may not submit a bonus project unless you attended the bonus lecture!
2. Due date
   • These bonus projects are due by the last day of classes.
3. What to submit
   • A timesheet recording all the time invested in the project.
     • Note that there is not a 1-to-1 correspondence between hours reported and hours credited.
     • You are expected on the honor code to report your time accurately.
   • A list of names of anyone with whom you collaborated on the project.
     • Note that the collaboration policy is relaxed for bonus projects, and you can work with one or two other students as a group.  You may even submit a single group project, though you must submit one timesheet for each student.  Note that you still should not consult students outside of your group.  Of course, you may consult the instructor or CA's as always.
   • The actual project itself.
4. Project quiz
   • Depending on the nature of your project, you may be asked to take a short quiz (either written or oral) to demonstrate that you sufficiently mastered the material to warrant the given bonus hours.

Bonus Projects

You may do any, or all (or, of course, none!) of these.  Actual hours credited will depend on the amount and quality of work submitted, and to some extent on the timesheets.  In any case, there is a limit of 10 hours total bonus for this activity (except for writing your own simulators as noted below), and that includes the 2 hours of bonus you already received for attending the lecture.  A good idea would be to invest about 2 or 3 hours in each of the activities listed below, finishing as many exercises within each activity as possible in that time.  You do not have to do every exercise in order to receive bonus credit.  Alternatively, of course, you could invest all your time in just one of the activities listed below, not just completing the given exercises but taking them further in some clever and compelling fashion.

(Note:  to use xLogicCircuits or xComputer, you should first download the entire TMCM web site (Windows download or Linux download) -- in particular, you will want to run these as applications, by double-clicking on the jar files in the "classes" directory, and not as applets, as the latter will not allow you to save your files containing your circuits and assembly language programs!)

(Another note:  Do NOT just do the exercises in these labs.  FIRST, READ THE LABS CAREFULLY.  The text for each lab is invaluable, and you should very carefully read it!)

• xLogicCircuits Lab #1 (Logic Circuits) with its exercises
   
• xLogicCircuits Lab #2 (Memory Circuits) with its exercises
   
• xComputer Lab #1 (Intro to xComputer) with its exercises
   
• xComputer Lab #2 (Assembly Language Programming) with its exercises
   
• xComputer Lab #3 (Subroutines in Assembly Language) with its exercises

Here are some great projects, once we cover arrays in class:

• Write your own circuit generator.  It should read in a truth table from a file, then it should create the circuit corresponding to the DNF for that truth table.  Ideally, you should save the circuit in a file format readable by xLogicCircuits, so it can then be loaded into xLogicCircuits and tested.  Failing that, you should save it in a format that is easily human-readable and so can be used as a guide to creating the corresponding xLogicCircuits circuit.
   
• Write your own circuit simulator.  It does not have to have a graphical user interface, though that would be really cool!
   
• Write your own xComputer simulator.  Again, no need for a graphical user interface -- you can load an assembly language program from a file, assemble it into a machine language program, run it until it halts, then save all the memory locations to a text file.  That's enough to see if your simulator works.

Note that these last two projects (writing your own simulators) are more challenging than the previous projects, and may require more than 10 hours to complete.  Thus, for truly exceptional simulator projects, more than 10 hours of bonus may be rewarded, but no more than 20 hours of bonus in any case (and you will surely have to invest more than 20 hours of time, and produce excellent results, to obtain this amount of bonus!).

Finally, there is always the option to create your own bonus project on this material.  Just be sure to run it by the course instructor first, to ensure that it is bonus-worthy!

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