H79.2584 Lecture 4 Credits
Instructor(s): Krikorian
Computation didn't always mean silicon, microprocessors, and electricity: flat stones and dust paved the way for the Babilonians and the Chinese to create the abacus, and Babbage used metal and gears to construct his hand-cranked Difference engine. This class' raw materials will be wood, plastic, metal, and anything else a student can get his or hands on, sans electricity. Students will be expected to exercise their creativity while attempting to build "adders" and "memory units" without the affordances of modern computation. These weekly assignments will all culminate in a single working final project. Class participants will examine our reliance on modern technology, and to question whether we can create home-brewed computation in disenfranchised areas. As this class is meant to be an exploration of doing computation without a computer, students will be asked to build the answer to the question: "calculator is to abacus as computer is to what?"
