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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 12.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Who first thought of constructing a machine that could calculate logarithms?
(a) Galileo.
(b) John Napier.
(c) Issac Newton.
(d) Charles Babbage.

2. What machine was constructed by Charles Babbage?
(a) The difference engine.
(b) The calculator.
(c) The computer.
(d) The difference analyzer.

3. Chaotic looking numbers may have simplistic algorithms but why are many difficult to determine?
(a) The number is too difficult to compress through computation.
(b) The number is too complex.
(c) Because they are not computable.
(d) It is impossible to work back from the number to find them.

4. In what field was Charles Babbage an early pioneer?
(a) Astronomy.
(b) Computer science.
(c) Advanced mathematics.
(d) Physics.

5. What can the amount of information in a message be expressed in?
(a) By the algorithm that produces it.
(b) By its integral number.
(c) By the computation that produces it.
(d) By the bits it contains.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does the word "cybernetics" mean?

2. What type of lists did Babbage create about livestock, fabric, letter combinations in various languages and other facts?

3. What game did Shannon plan to teach his computer to play?

4. What process can measure the limits of the human mind?

5. What caused the errors that were contained in the tables of logarithms that had to be calculated themselves?

(see the answer key)

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