Week Three

This week I ate at a bunch of interesting restaurants. I had Indian food with leadership alliance group which was delicious, though I love spicy food and put the hot sauce provided on most of my food. I had Barbecue at Red Bones in Somerville, which was Texas style barbeque. I am from North Carolina where we have our own style of barbecue so did not enjoy the Texas barbecue too much. One day for lunch I went to a Belgian place in Boston called Saus, they had great waffles and fries and a ton of different dipping sauces. I also ate at two hamburger places, UBurger and Four Burger both were very tasty and good burgers. One night I went out with a group of people to get dessert at a pub called Rock Bottom. They had amazing brownies with ice cream, doughnut holes, and giant pieces of carrot cake.

Saturday and Sunday I went to a meetup for people from the internet in Boston Commons, which is the park. It was a great way to meet people from the area and other people who were new to the city or just visiting for a short period of time. People brought snacks, frisbees, football, apples to apple, cards against humanity, lawn games, and other activities. I was able to make a couple friends and have the chance to meet new people from different places. I would definitely recommend looking up event going on in cities you are visiting it.s a great way gain information about the city you are visiting and gives you a chance to socialize.

For reading group this week we discussed real numbers in relation to computer science, mathematics, and computational geometry. We read an article by Jeff Erickson titled CG models of computation? and a stack exchange question-answer discussing why the real-RAM model is used in computational geometry. During our talk we also touched on complexities of P-space, P-time, log-space, log-time, and other class classification.

For my research this week I started reading Cellular Automata Modeling of Physical Systems by Chopard and Droz. I have narrowed down my focus area to Oscillators in relation to Conways Game of Life. I plan to try and create one of the missing oscillators and look into oscillators in different cellular automata that do not follow the rules of Conways life. I have been playing around with the program Golly, which is the main program currently used for Cellular Automata. I have been testing different patterns and watching how they evolve and am trying to find correlations between patterns that die out, explode, and oscillate. I would like to be able to find or create some guidelines for generating oscillators.

I saw a lot of street performers this week ranging from dancers to live statues. I saw a girl who did amazing acrobatic stunts, a man playing the saxaphone, A group of break dancers, and a lot of live bands. I enjoy being in a lively city that is easy to travel. Since Boston is small I am able to easily take the train and buses and usually I can walk easily from one side of the city to the other.