Intro to Kara
Channel: Discrete Structures UNC-CH COMP283
Date: 24/07/2019

Kara is a simple model of programming: a Turing machine with a 2-d tape that can hold clovers, trees, and mushrooms.  Kara has a set of states, which is its internal memory, a set of sensors to detect what is in its neighborhood on the tape, and a list of transition rules, which are functions from state x a Boolean combination of sensors → state x a string of actions. The state diagram is a graph that shows us Kara's programming.  Sets, functions, strings, Boolean logic, graphs -- all of these are more formally defined in Discrete Structures.

This accompanies Dr. Snoeyink's Discrete Structures class, COMP 283, at UNC Chapel Hill.  Worksheet available here: http://cs.unc.edu/~snoeyink/c283/intro-kara.pdf

Kara comes from SwissEduc: https://www.swisseduc.ch/compscience/karatojava/kara/
and is available as a Java jar file, which you can run in Eclipse or by installing java from java.com and running java -jar kara-en.jar

With thanks for the copyright and royalty-free music; credit in the trailer.