CS346 - Useful Links and Additional Notes

  • Instructions for downloading MATLAB onto your computer. Note that this MATLAB, which is available through a Classroom License, may require that your computer have a Colby IP address for it to work, and it is licensed only for use for coursework, not research. (If you'd like more information on using MATLAB for research, feel free to ask your prof.)

  • The MATLAB "Getting Started" guide from Mathworks is a good beginning reference.

    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!

  • Some important programming style notes and guidelines for our work with Matlab in CS346 this semester.

  • The paper Can robots make good models of biological behaviour? by Barbara Webb is available through the Colby Library.

  • 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.

  • An article about the online simulator used by Prof. Ahmad in his guest lecture about Hodgkin-Huxley. The article contains download links for the simulator, one for an IOS app and one for a Flash application. (Note: I have not tested those links.)

  • In preparation for Prof. Noh's guest lecture, please look through the paper Cooperation and conflict in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. (I think the pictures in it are both informative and interesting!)