Coding Demos

R Programming - 5 Minutes, 10 Lines

Assumed background - some recollectin of basic cell biology. Goal - get a glimpse of looking at some interesting data in R programming.
R is a great language for dealing with large tabular data, statistics, and making nice looking graphs and visualizations. So, for an R programmer of middling experience, what can we come up with in 5 minutes and 10 lines of code? Checkout this demo.
Video - the data | Video - the code | code and data | reference

The Halting Problem - Scooping the Loop Snooper

Assumed background - some familiarity with programming. Goal - a reading of a cool proof of a very famous theorem, in verse form.
This is not a coding demo, but is quite fun. You may have heard of the " halting problem" - is it possible design software so that it can test whether any program given to it will halt eventually, or will go into an infinite loop? The answer is "no" - it may be quite easy to determine whether many programs halt, but there will always be very tricky difficult programs that cannot be decided. And the fun? A proof that the halting problem is undecidable, in poem form!
Scooping the Loop Snooper | helper file | [A reading, a bit of explanation - coming soon]

Running Time - How Many Steps

Assumed background - some familiarity with programming. Goal - basic introduction to running time of programs, with prime testing as the example.
An important part of Computer Science is designing programs that are efficient - that they finish their tasks in a reasonable amount of time. For example, you enter a search on Google, and you expect the results to come back reasonably quickly. We can get a glimpse of what goes into running time analysis by looking at a first attempt at a program to determine if a number is prime.
[Video explanation - coming soon] | code

More demos coming soon...