H211: Introduction to Computer Science (Honors)

Announcements

December 7, 2000

• Final final administrative details:
  • The last time for appointments is Friday Dec. 15 but I am not free Thursday Dec. 14 in the afternoon nor much of Friday.
  • Your report should be around 2 to 3 pages. Its purpose is to give me enough information to understand what's going on.
  • Before your meeting, please email me your reports and your code for render.

December 4, 2000

• Final administrative details:
  • Please set up an appointment for your group. It would be convenient if you emailed me your reports the day before.
  • Given the absolute grades on the second midterm, your grade will be relative to the entire C211/H211 population as much as possible. Since you only shared one exam with C211 (the first midterm), we will start with the following baseline grade: your final grade will be equal to your first midterm grade plus or minus one letter grade. So if you got a B on the first midterm, your final grade will be in the range A, B, or C.
  • The exact grade will be a function of the following:
    • Your second midterm grade.
    • The quality of the group project.
    • Your individual contribution to the group project.
  • Let me know if you have any questions or comments on the above.

December 1, 2000

• I came across the announcement for a software award. It might be appropriate for you to extend the ray tracer and submit it!

November 29, 2000

• I have added a couple of more functions to the file render.ss.

November 25, 2000

• My solutions to everything except for the implementation of render is now available from the gml-solutions page.
• Assignment 12 will not be posted on the web page. We will cover it in lectures in detail. The first milestone will be to deal with planes, transformations, and unions. No spheres and light sources yet. This is sufficient to deal with one of the test examples rotate.gml. Here is the output that you should get for that GML file.
• Link to an explanation of how to compute the intersection of a ray and a plane.
• Once you are done with planes, transformations, and unions, you can try working on spheres, and test your program on the ellipsoid file. Finally add light sources. Using my implementation here are the produced images for all Tier-I images (my implementation was partly inspired by the PLClub solution but is much slower and suffers from the surface acne explained in the project description but that will do for now :-).
  • spheres.ppm
  • submarine.ppm
  • holes.ppm
  • fractal.ppm
  • large.ppm
  • fov-120.ppm
  • fov-90.ppm
  • fov-60.ppm
  • fov-30.ppm
  • ellipsoid-2.ppm
  • ellipsoid-1.ppm
  • rotate.ppm

November 17, 2000

• The solution to the second midterm has been posted.

November 16, 2000

• I have posted Assignment 11. I'll try to post Assignment 12 soon, but basically it will ask you to implement as much as possible of the render primitive in GML. You should definitely focus on the Tier-1 aspects first.

November 13, 2000

• I have updated the gml-solutions page.
• There will be no lecture on Wed.
• Remember the midterm on Thursday!

November 10, 2000

• As usual in any situation that involves group work, not everybody is happy, and some people are not contributing much if at all. Let me remind you of the evaluation procedure:
  • Each individual must submit a written report explaining contributions to the project.
  • I will meet with each group in what is essentially an oral exam.
  • The grade for the project is about $40\%$ of your final grade.

November 6, 2000

• Assignment 10 has been posted. It does everything except for render which will be the subject of the next and last assignment.

November 2, 2000

• I had a mistake in the output of lookup-env in Assignment 9. Fixed.
• Amr's office hours this week on Friday from 11-12 have been cancelled. (Only this week.)

October 30, 2000

• The second midterm will be in Jordan Hall A100.
• My solution to the GML parser is available from the GML solutions page.
• Assignment 9 has been posted.
• Please read about using the final project instead of a final exam under the link for "Exams".

October 18, 2000

• I just posted Assignment 8. Sorry for the delay.

October 17, 2000

• My solution to the GML tokenizer is available.

October 10, 2000

• As discussed in class yesterday, please form groups of 2 or 3, and email Amr and Craig.

October 6, 2000

• Midterm is graded, and all the grades are posted to Post-Em (along with assignment 5's grades). Congrats to everyone, you all did an outstanding job. You'll probably get the midterms back either the beginning of this week, or in lab. As a side note, "The Scheme Programming Language" is linked from the class syllabus ... so make sure and give it at least a peek, if nothing else just to bookmark -- I swear, it'll come in handy. :)

September 27, 2000

• Idea for project. Instead of the current homeworks, some of you (all of you?) would prefer a project. The project I am proposing is described above. Please take a look, and let me know if there is interest.