Hey, like being nerd sniped? Then you might be interested in this seminar-style class about math/algorithms riddles. I'll be going over some broad thinking skills, but mostly we will be playing around with some tricky problems as a group. The problem statements will be short but they will make you think!

A breadth-first survey of core techniques for generating chaos in a controlled classroom environment. Topics may include: table drumming, beatboxing, bad puns, pen spinning, paper basketball, kazoo, finger snaps, paper football, laser pointing. DISCLAIMER: Please use good judgment and avoid actually getting yourself in trouble.

Alice wants to talk to Bob, but they don't want Eve to listen. Come learn too many ways to solve Computer Science's most boring social dynamics problem.

Computers generally store text as strings of characters, but we'd like to do a bit more with these characters. In this class, we will think of each character that we add as changing the state of our text. So if we want to find some key words in our text, we could just let our state be how close we are to finding a word. We will also interpret human speech as a series of transitions between states of conversation, and show how a computer could mimic a human's preferred states.