CS250 - Additional Notes / Readings

  • Can robots make good models of biological behaviour? by Barbara Webb. (Note: Link is through the Vassar library; Vassar authentication required.)

  • The MATLAB "Getting Started" guide from Mathworks is a good beginning reference, available in HTML.

    Please note that the "Getting Started" guide is not exhaustive--there are many important and useful features of Matlab outside of its scope. Please explore the Matlab help pages (using the help browser, the help and doc commands, the search documentation window in the Matlab environment, etc.) for more about what Matlab can do. And as always, feel free to ask your prof. any questions as well!

  • Anonymous functions in Matlab are the kind of thing we're all accustomed to from lambda expressions in Scheme. Matlab provides some documentation about anonymous functions in Matlab, but I encourage you to do a web-search for other perspectives and information about anonymous functions as well!

  • This short document (from a Davidson College website) gives a concise summary of how to apply the Runge-Kutta 4 simulation method to a second-order differential equation. It can be useful for coding a simulation of an undamped spring (see Ch.3.2 in our textbook).

  • Neuroscience Online is an electronic textbook for the neurosciences. Please read Chapters 1 and 2 as part of our work with the Hodgkin-Huxley model of action potentials in neurons.