UCSB Freshman Seminar “What is computing?”, Fall 2016

Some questions posted by the class after Lecture 6, November 1, 2016

• How do people figure out how to make computers more efficient? 
• How far can artificial intelligence integrate into human society? What exactly are supercomputers?
• How can we know whether a problem is solvable or not? Won't there be problems that actually can be solved but just no one has thought about a solution?
• If there are fundamental limitations, what is computing defined as exactly?
• I found that the Traveling Salesman Problem seems very similar to the subject of minimum spanning trees.What differentiates the two such that MSTs are more “compatible” with computing?
• Which jobs are becoming extinct because of computers?
• What’s a real life example of Moore’s Law?
• What are the differences between technological and physical limitations? 
• What amount of time makes a program not impossible but unfeasible? Are there other hardware limitations which do not have to do with time?
• In general cases, is it impossible to write a program to prove or disprove claims about an infinite set? Does this suggests computer lack the capacity of abstraction?
• With the development of artificial intelligence, which has the ability to learn, would computers be able to perform the jobs doctors do eventually?
• Is every living being technically a biological computer?
• What can we define as a biological computer?
• Is there a law/rule that you can use that will determine if a particular problem can be solved through computing?
• What is a proposed alternative to the turing machine?