Week One

I mainly used this week to get settled in and acquainted with the campus. I had my first meeting with the reading group I will be working with. Each week I will be required to read different articles that relate to theoretical computer science. This week I read two short papers, There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom by R.P. Feynman and Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems by L. Adleman. I also watched two TED talks both by Paul Rothemund, Details DNA folding and Cast a spell with DNA. I really enjoyed having a chance to read articles that I did not know pertained to computer science. Along with my weekly readings I started reading other papers related to theoretical computer science, in hopes of finding what I want to do my research on for the next 10 weeks. I have read papers discussing the Art Gallery problems, Packing problems, and Cellular Automata. I believe I have settled on Cellular Automata and mainly the Garden of Eden problems dealing with Orphans. Orphans are finite patterns that can not occur as part of the evolution of another pattern, they are Garden of Edens that can be extended in any direction to form other Gardens of Edens.