User:Cat33

Basics

Courtney Trutna

Year: Pratt '17

Interested in Studying: Biomedical Engineering

Interests: Ultimate Frisbee, Theater Tech

Grand Challenges for Engineering

The article below is about a virtual "version" of a brain-- possibly bringing us one step closer to being able to fully understand the real thing.

Bringing a Virtual Brain to Life, Tim Requarth, NY Times, 3/18/13, Accessed 9/5/13 (Reverse Engineer the Brain)

MATLAB Demo

My favorite MATLAB demo was the "Traveling Salesmen" problem demo. I didn't immediately associate the problem with the title, so when I opened the GUI, the instant recognition of the posed challenge was entertaining. This demo was a proof to me of potential applications for MATLAB programming I hadn't previously considered-- beyond graphing and calculations that could be done inside another interface, but something where having a script-like control over the computer is useful. It was fun to see how the first random guess is so poor, lacking the intuition a person solving this problem would have, and get a glimpse into the time taken to run the calculations when obvious (graphically) pathways switches took so long to reach computationally. Opening the code, it was interesting to see both the computational coding and the graphical interface coding, both vaguely recognizable but not comprehensible to me. The potential of creating a graphical user interface with MATLAB was also something I was unaware of before exploring these demos, which was another reason this demo was impressive.