Hello, and welcome to our first question and answer session.
I'm Joe, the assistant instructor of the class, and I'm here with Dave, our instructor.
Hi, it looks like there's been a lot of activity on the forums
and some interesting questions to answer, so let's get started
looking at some of those questions.
Our first question comes from Insa, who wants to know
how many of the questions on the future problem set
and the final exam will be primarily programming-based questions,
and how many will be primarily mathematics based?
It's going to be a mix.
Cryptography is really a branch of mathematics,
so there's a lot of math in crypto,
but we also want to build things, and we are interested in programs
and the computing aspects of that, so there will be questions that
either require you to write a program or more often questions where
to solve them well you probably have to write a program,
but the goal is to solve the question, not to write the program for its own sake.
There will be a mix.
There will be a few questions on each homework that do involve writing programs.
Many that don't, though, and those will be more involving the mathematics.
