Database questions

Database Questions

Questions from Grover – p.148

1. What is a database?

a. A collection of information organized in such a way that a computer program can quickly select desired pieces of data.

2. What is the most important function of a database? To sort things out so you can find them easily.

3. What are the advantages of using a database?

Reduced data redundancy

Reduced updating errors and increased consistency

Greater Data integrity

Reduced updating errors and increased consistency

Greater data integrity and independence from applications programs

Improved data access to users through use of host and query languages

Improved data security

Reduced data entry, storage, and retrieval costs Facilitated development of new applications program

4. The table below contains data about some books in a library. What other data might be included in a library’s database about its books?

BookID	Author	Title	Publisher
222334	Grisham	The Brethren	Arrow
232145	Rowling	Harry Potter	Bloomsbury
218934	Moon	Discover Australia	Random House

Number of copies

5. What items of data would be relevant for a database in a supermarket?

Item ID

6. You would expect a video hire shop to have a computerized database. What is the advantage of this from the owner’s viewpoint? How would it benefit the customer?

From the owner’s point of view, it would be absolutely easy to find out if the videos are overdue.

From the customer’s point of view, it will save him time.

7. How would you find out about available flights to Europe for the next school holidays?

Jetstar’s website

Questions from Grover – p.150

1. What are the main components of a database?

Searching, sorting, entering data,

2. What is the difference between a record and a field?

A record is a lot of fields put together and a field is something you enter the data in like name.

3. What are primary keys? What are they used for?

Fields that can not be the same or null. They are used to recognize each record individually.

4. Draw up a table which could be used for data about students who borrow books from a library. Identify and label a record, a field and the primary key.

5. Why would we not put the students’ data in the same file as the books?

The library doesn’t need the students data. It only needs the books’ ID and Students ID

6. If data is repeated unnecessarily in a table, it is called redundant. Why do you think that databases should be designed to minimise data redundancy?

The databases are much easier to sort, when trying to find something. The databases will be much shorter in relation to the one with redundants.

#4 Simulations

Imitation of a real thing or process is called simulation. We simulate the key characterisitics or behaviours of a selected physical system. Maple sim is the software that is used to simulate.

#3 Forward and Backward chaining

Forward-chaining implies that upon assertion of new knowledge, all relevant inductive and deductive rules are fired exhaustively, effectively making all knowledge about the current state explicit within the state. Forward chaining may be regarded as progress from a known state, the original knowledge, towards a goal state.

Backward-chaining by an architecture means that no rules are fired upon assertion of new knowledge. When an unknown predicate about a known piece of knowledge is detected in an operator’s condition list, all rules relevant to the knowledge in question are fired until the question is answered or until quiescence. Thus, backward chaining systems normally work from a goal state back to the original state.

#2 The Turing Test

A test proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing, and often taken as a test of whether a computer has “humanlike” intelligence. If a panel of human beings conversing with an unknown entity believes that, that entity is human, and if the entity is actually a computer, then the computer is said to have passed the Turing test.

Alan Turing’s imitation game has fueled 40 years of controversy, with little sign of slowing. On one side of the argument, human-like interaction is seen as absolutely essential to human-like intelligence. A successful AI is worthless if its intelligence lies trapped in an unresponsive program.

It answered every question except for the last one. It doesn’t pass the Turing test but it was very close.

#1 AI

1. What is AI?

It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.

2. Is AI achievable?

AI is only achievable to a little extent these days. But it won’t be long before it reaches its full power as we are experiencing the staring of a high – tech futuristic age.

How has AI been represented in film? (refer to at least TWO films)

The most important and the hottest topic these days is Artificial Intelligence. I said important because it is maybe the only thing that can lead us to a futuristic life. These days AI is most commonly used in animated movies like “Transformers”, “irobot”

4.Which film do you think represents AI in the most plausible way?

Transformers is the latest and the best film which represents and applies Artificial intelligence. To make “Transformers” they went through a lot of programming and used the best technology they could to use artificial intelligence to make a highly graphical and futuristic movie.”Transformers” is a complete interpretation of Computer programmed robots having human characteristics and abilities.

Algorithm for a numeric value

Algorithm for a numeric value

Converting metres to feet

<!–[if mso & !supportInlineShapes & supportFields]&gt; SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT &lt;![endif]–>

Begin

Input: x metres

INCHES = metres*3.28

Output: Inches

END

<!–[if mso & !supportInlineShapes & supportFields]&gt; &lt;![endif]–>

<!–[if mso & !supportInlineShapes & supportFields]&gt; SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT &lt;![endif]–>

<!–[if mso & !supportInlineShapes & supportFields]&gt; &lt;![endif]–>

IPO Tables 13/05/2008

Basic programming concepts

 

 

 

IPO Chart

 

Input	Process	Output
Cm	Inches = cm*2.54	Inches

 

 

Data: cm and Inches

 

Types of Data

 

Numbers

Integers / floating point

Integers – Whole numbers

Floating Point – decimal number (with decimal places)

                        - Different languages with different terms for floating point numbers (e.g. Pascal uses REAL, Visual Basic.NET uses DOUBLE)

 

String

Alphanumeric data / text

 

Boolean

True/false

 

BINARY AND HEXADECIMAL CONVERSIONS

Binary and Hexadecimal Conversions

	Binary Code	64	32	16	8	4	2	1	Decimal Number
a	0001011	0	0	0	1	0	1	1	11
b	1000000	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	64
c	1010111	1	0	1	0	1	1	1	87
d	1001001	1	0	0	1	0	0	1	73
e	1100001	1	1	0	0	0	0	1	97
f	0011111	0	0	1	1	1	1	1	31
g	1110001	1	1	1	0	0	0	1	113
h	1111101	1	1	1	1	1	0	1	125
i	1000010	1	0	0	0	0	1	0	66
j	1111111	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	255
	Decimal number	64	32	16	8	4	2	1	Binary Code
a	65	1	0	0	0	0	0	1	1000001
b	19	0	0	1	0	0	1	1	0010011
c	40	0	1	0	1	0	0	0	0101000
d	47	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0101111
e	101	1	1	0	0	1	0	1	1100101
f	78	1	0	0	1	1	1	0	1001110
g	119	1	1	1	0	1	1	1	1110111
h	58	0	1	1	1	0	1	0	0111010
i	98	1	1	0	0	0	1	0	1100010
j	124	1	1	1	1	1	0	0	1111100

 

	Hexadecimal	4096	256	16	1	Decimal Number
a	1D			1	D	29
b	13			1	3	19
c	18			1	8	22
d	130		1	3	0	304
e	274		2	7	4	628
f	142		1	4	2	322
g	34A		3	4	A	842
h	2A21	2	A	2	1	10785
i	FF			F	F	255
j	10DE	1	0	D	E	4318
	Decimal Number	4096	256	16	1	Hexadecimal
a	600		2	5	8	258
b	21			1	5	15
c	40			2	8	28
d	42			2	A	2A
e	258		1	0	2	102
f	342		1	5	6	156
g	612		2	6	4	264
h	4096	1	0	0	0	1000
i	4134	1	0	2	6	1024
j	1000		3	E	8	3E8

Comparison and Contrast of Paint and Photoshop

Sandeep Talada Thursday, May 08, 2008

This report will cover the comparison and contrast between paint and Photoshop.

Paint is a graphics painting program. Its save format is bitmap image. Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editor developed and published by adobe systems. Paint is easy to use for basic shapes and cropping images. But photoshop’s features and the overview is amazing and anything done on it is  purely productive.

Features

Adobe Photoshop:

1. Rolloveers

2. Image Slicing

3. Web optimization

4. Animation

5. Precise making

6. Art History brush

7. Contact sheets

8. History Palette

9. Easy Consistent Design tools (Integrated adobe user interface)

10. Seamless web Graphics flow

11. Layer effects

Paint:

1. Free form select

2. Eraser/color eraser

3. Fill Color

4. Magnifier

5. pencil, brush and air brush

6. Rectangle, polygon, ellipse, curve, rounded rectangle

7. Text

Advantages

Paint: Paint comes free with windows operating system. For new users that started working with a graphics program paint is the best option its simplicity and small size makes it easier to learn. Its a pretty basic image editor and it needs only a little amount of system resources to run. This is an advantage for an old computer. It is also bug-free software.

Adobe Photoshop: It has great tools photo colour correcting and image manipulation. Its user friendly, multi-purpose, very comprehensive graphics program and excellent features. Photoshop is a vital program because it contains superior colour lookup tables.

Disadvantages

Paint:A very limited graphics program with basic editing capabilities. Works only on windows operating system.

Adobe Photoshop: Photoshop is very expensive and the loading interface takes quite long, It takes a while to know the tools and features of photoshop due to its complexity Needs a high resolution graphics card

I think the best software package is Adobe Photoshop because of its high end graphics manipulation and easy to use tools which allow you to make easy image editing, animation and authoring. Adobe Photoshop is more user – friendly.

Lesson on 07-05-2008

ASCII – American Standard Code for Information Interchange ( Usually 7bits, a parity bit for checking data accuracy)

EBCDIC – Extended Binary Coded Interchange Code (8bits)

1bit – the smallest unit of measurement holds a 1 or 0

8bits – 1byte

1024 bytes – 1 kilobyte

1024 kb      – 1 megabyte

1024 mb     – 1 gigabyte

1024 gb      – 1 terrabyte

1024 tb      – 1 petabyte

1024 pb     -  1 exabyte

1024 eb     -  1 zettabyte

1024 zb     -  1yotabyte