Welcome to COSC 273!

Outline

  • Introductions
  • Lab Section Plan
  • Lab 01: Estimating Pi
  • Other Examples

(general course introduction in lecture)

Introductions

Your Professor

  • Will Rosenbaum
  • Originally from Seattle
  • Undregrad at Reed College in Portland, OR
  • PhD in Mathematics from UCLA
  • Postdocs at
    • Tel Aviv University
    • Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Saarbruecken, Germany)
  • Started at Amherst last fall

My Research

  • Theoretical Computer Science
    • Interface between math and CS
  • Theory of Distributed Systems
    • What can systems of interacting processors (broadly construed) compute?
  • Research Questions
    • How efficiently can a computational task be performed in principle?
    • What resources (time, memory, communication) are required to perform tasks?
    • What tasks cannot be solved efficiently?

Outside of Work

  • Spend most time with family: Alivia, Ione (daughter), Finnegan (dog), Pip & Posy (cats)
  • Hobbies: cooking, playing piano, hiking

Lab Sessions

Purpose

  • Informal discussion (small groups)
  • Get questions answered
  • Lectures focus on principles
  • Labs focus on practice (i.e., coding)
    • Troubleshooting code, etc

Lab Structure

  • Orientation/Lab introduction
  • Questions
  • Small group discussion
  • Brief recap

Lab Enrollment

Current enrollment:

  • Lab 01: 36
  • Lab 02: 5

Need to balance these enrollments!

  • I’ll send out questionnaire to balance sections class as equitably as equitably as possible

Course Enrollment

  • Currently full
  • Many others want to enroll
  • If you plan to drop the class, please do so early so that others can enroll during add/drop period

Lab 01: Estimating Pi

A Formula from High School

dartboard

Area of a disk: \(A = \pi r^2\)

An Idea from Probability

Pick a random point inside the framed region.

dartboard

The probability the point lies in the disk is proportional to the disk’s area.

In More Detail

  • area of disk is \(\pi r^2\)
  • area of surrounding square is \((2 r)^2 = 4 r^2\)
  • the probability that a (uniformly) random point in the square lies in the disk is: \(\frac{\text{area of circle}}{\text{area of square}} = \frac{\pi r^2}{4 r^2} = \frac 1 4 \pi.\)

so…

Estimation by Sampling

…to estimate \(\pi\), suffices to estimate the probability that a random point point in the square lies inside the disk:

  • pick a bunch of random points
  • see how many lie in disk
  • \(p =\) proportion of points that do
  • \[\pi \approx 4 p\]

Example of Monte Carlo method

An Example by Hand

dartboard

Number of Samples:

Number of Hits:

\(\pi\) Estimate:

Does This Work?

  • Mathematically guaranteed to work most of the time, for sufficiently many random points
  • How many?
  • How efficient is this solution?

Basic Pi Demo

Speeding Things Up

A nice feature of the code:

  • The more samples we run, the better the approximation
  • Samples can be run independently and results aggregated

Speeding Things Up

A nice feature of modern computers:

  • They can do multiple independent operations in parallel
  • We can generate indpendent samples concurrently
  • Just need to figure out how in code!

Parallel Pi Demo

Threads in Java

Threads…

  • are single sequences of operations
  • can be executed concurrently/in parallel by modern computers
  • can be created/run by making instances of the Thread class
  • are incredibly subtle to reason about

Lab 01

Use multithreading to estimate \(\pi\) as quickly as possible (using Monte Carlo method above)

Multithreading is Great!

Fractal Example