• Each student in the class will be expected to submit an video presentation on some topic related to the course material.  The presentation should not be a technical document that merely produces the proof of some theorem.  Ideally, it will deal with some aspect of the theory of computability not covered in the lectures or it will explore the connection between some of the material covered in the course with some other branch of mathematics, computer science, philosophy, psychology, history, etc, or with popular culture.  The presentation could be historical in nature, for example, covering the motivation and/or circumstances leading up to the development of the formal notion of an algorithm.
  
• The course textbook may provide some ideas for topics, but you might be better off looking through other sources.  See below for a few suggestions.  Dr. Valeriote may also be able to provide assistance with this.
• Once you have settled on a topic, please send it in an email to Dr. Valeriote.
• Ideally, the same topic won't be selected by more than one or two students, so you should come up with a short list of possible esssay topics.
• The length of the video should be around 15 minutes.
• All sources used in your presentation should be properly referenced and you should reference at least two separate, published sources.
• Videos should be submitted in a standard video format to a dropbox that will be set up on the Avenue To Learn site for this course.
• Once the videos have been submitted, they will be made available to the class for viewing.

Deadlines:

1. Friday, 14 November: send your presentation topic in an email to Dr. Valeriote.  
2. Wednesday, 3 December by 11:59pm: submit a  copy of your presentation to the Avenue to learn course site.

• "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics" by Roger Penrose, published by Oxford University Press.
• "Shadows of the Mind, a search for the Missing Science of Consciousness" by Roger Penrose, published by Oxford University Press.
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy website entries on computability, the Church-Turing thesis, complexity theory, Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, ...
• Introductory books on the theory of computation, such as  "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" by Michael Sipser, or "Elements of the Theory of Computation" by Lewis and Papadimitriou.
• "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter 
• Turing's original paper on computability:  “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2(42): 230–265 (this can be downloaded here.)
• "The Golden Ticket" by Lance Fortnow (available as an ebook from the McMaster Library system)
• "Quantum Computing since Democritus" by Scottt Aaronson (available as an ebook from the McMaster Library system)
• "Turing's Revolution", edited by G. Sommaruga and T. Strahm.  This book is available as an ebook through the McMaster Library system

• The Turing Test
• Machine Learning
• The undecidable
• Other models of computation (lambda-calculus, Minsky machines, recursive functions ...)
• Artificial Intelligence
• Chomsky Hierarchy
• Push down automata
• Grammars
• Complexity classes besides P and NP
• Cellular Automata
• Hilbert's Program
• NP complete problems
• Quantum Computing
• Connections with mathematical logic