English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing died #OTD in 1954.
During World War II, he played a crucial role in deciphering the Enigma code used by the German military, significantly contributing to the Allied war effort. In his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," he proposed the famous Turing Test as a criterion for determining whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.
"We are not asking whether all digital computers would do well in the game nor whether the computers at present available would do well, but whether there are imaginable computers which would do well."
"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."
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Please join us for the third ACM SIGCAS Works in Progress event of 2024 where Varun Rao will be giving a talk on "Societal Impacts of AI on Labor: Studies of Rideshare and Social Media Ad Platforms"!
The talks will be on June 17th 2024 at 12pm EDT (4pm UTC).
Registration is required for the event where you can register here:
Alan Turing submits On Computable Numbers for publication.
His proof shows that there can be no mechanical, general method (i.e., a Turing machine or a program in some equivalent model of computation) to determine whether algorithms halt. However, each individual instance of the halting problem has a definitive answer, which may or may not be practically computable.
🐍 aprxc — A #Python#CLI tool to approximate the number of distinct values in a file/iterable using the Chakraborty/Vinodchandran/Meel’s (‘coin flip’) #algorithm¹.
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#kdtree and ball trees seem cool, but require full knowledge of the thing I'm searching for. What if it's 7 dimensional and I only know 4 of the values?
I feel like a "parallel kd tree" with a separate binary index on each dimension would work better here.
Reduce depth. Allow unspecified values. It'd also be a snap to create and search each dim in parallel.
If you are interested in presenting "work in progress" that intersects computing and society, consider submitting a talk to ACM SIGCAS Works In Progress (WIP). These are online discussions where you can present your work, discuss it with the SIGCAS community, and gain insightful feedback.
Fascinating article from IEEE Spectrum that discusses the carbon footprint of software and how we can both measure and improve it: https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-software
The benefit is not only less carbon, but following some of the principles that are outlined can decrease costs and improve efficiency.
The article references tools such as Firefox Profiler and Ecograder as well as an open source Sustainable Software Engineering course.