From: Janet Davis (jlnd_at_cs.washington.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 11 2004 - 15:13:03 PST
On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Anonymous Sender wrote:
> Why do we have to calculate porpabilities in the homework? This is not a
> statistics class, we should be doing homework problems on networking
> algorithms not calculating probabilities. Some of us might not have
> taken stat390 yet and might have a problem with these question.
Probabilities can be important for designing networking protocols. For
instance, knowing the likelihood of detecting a type of error a CRC or
other scheme is very useful when you are looking at the error
characteristics of a new medium and trying to decide what kind of error
detection to use in the link layer protocol. In the case of Peterson
4.23, are you better off sending routing packets according to the scheme
described in part (b) or the one in part (c)?
Although the syllabus does state an expectation that you are familiar with
basic probability concepts, I'll grant that it's not an official
prerequisite. We definitely aren't drawing on the most advanced concepts
from STAT390. In addition to the course staff and your peers, you may
find this short tutorial helpful:
http://www.mathgoodies.com/lessons/vol6/intro_probability.html
(I apologize in advance for the cutesy graphics -- this was the most
readable of the several tutorials I looked at.)
Also, we'll be doing a probability problem with Ethernet in quiz section
tomorrow.
Cheers,
Janet
-- Janet Davis jlnd_at_cs.washington.edu http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/jlnd/ _______________________________________________ Cse461 mailing list Cse461_at_cs.washington.edu http://mailman.cs.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/cse461
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