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.
@gutenberg_org I'm not sure the Turing test proves anything more than the gullibility of humans, not the consciousness of machines.
(Alan Moore & Kevin Nowlan)
Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts. He accepted hormone treatment, a procedure commonly referred to as chemical castration, as an alternative to prison. Turing died on 7 June 1954, aged 41, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as suicide, but the evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.
3/
@Moosader stack/heap differentiation and memory allocation in general. I'm tired of things that complexity-wise would run on a C64 bringing my modern r9 with 128 gigs of ram to it's knees O_x
#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.
You need to replace references to the variable "terrainHeightValue" in your code with "terrainHeatValue". You know it's limited to one function, and there are 5-8 instances to be replaced.
@LouisIngenthron Ummm.. I guess you've never used Eclipse IDE. I highlight the "bad" variable name then I hit the refactor ➡ rename (there is a keypress for it, I just don't use it) and then overtype the new name and press enter. It finds ALL the correct places (cause it understands the code) and just does the necessary replacement. Quick/easy/painless.. it knows how to do it better than I would in the sense it won't accidentally miss any occurrences I might.
@PHolder Same works with Visual Studio, and it works fine in smaller codebases, but in larger ones, it can take a few seconds to check every file for references.
With find & replace, otoh, I can highlight the variable name, press Ctrl+H and it prefills the "to replace" field and puts my cursor on the "replace with" field. Type it in and press enter and it's done, with no delay and only one mouse click.
(1/2) Data Compression: Theory and Applications - Stanford Course 👇🏼
Stanford University released a new course on data compression methods taught by Prof.Tsachy Weissman, Shubham Chandak, and Pulkit Tandon. As the demand for data increases at an exponential rate, data compression plays a pivotal role in providing efficient storage solutions. The course focuses on the foundations and theory of data compression.
(2/2) This full semester course has 18 lectures and covers the following topics:
✅ Lossless compression fundamentals
✅ Lossy compression
✅ Special topics
If you teach #computerscience or #programming and use #Canvas as your #learningmanagementsystem please join the conversation requesting restoration of file preview for common programming languages. Instructors can no longer annotate student submissions. It has been working for 5 years and now Instructure claims it’s not supported.
@bikenut I have to use canvas for school, no code previews required but...as a system, it does kinda suck. Like having teachers have to use markdown should be an option, not a must...it just ends up with really messy page structures between modules that are hard to navigate and unique to each teacher...
A team of computer manufacturers, users, & university people led by Grace Hopper meets to discuss the creation of a new programming language that would be called COBOL.
Throughout her career, Hopper made significant contributions to computer science, including the development of the concept of machine-independent programming languages, which greatly facilitated software development. Her compiler converted English terms into machine code understood by computers.
@davidbisset Is this your daughter who I know of from the context of being one of the first kids to do things at a WordCamp? And now she's a college junior?
Is there a program execution model in which the code is directly evaluated as an expression and the result is recorded in place as opposed to just executing it and recording the result in a new memory location?
@abuseofnotation In lazy evaluation a value can be represented as a function pointer plus arguments. So if the code says "z = x+y" then z is stored as a thunk (+, x, y), where x and y are themselves refs to other values. If something subsequent needs the actual value of z then the values of x and y are fetched and passed to the + function, and then the entire thunk is replaced with the result. So if z is then used again its already computed. Of course x and y could also be thunks, so likewise.
The notion of reduction in #ComputerScience, and particularly the notion of NP-completeness lead to surprising connections between a variety of fields.
Two of my favorite NP-complete problems are:
Kidney Donor Matching Markets (better algorithms literally save lives)
Knot Genus (a seemingly very abstract problem in topology)
Like, oh, you thought you were working on kidney donor matching markets? Surprise your #algorithm can be used to find the genus of a knot! And vice versa!
Big caveat here is: NP-completeness of the decision problems doesn't, by itself, tell you the same relationship between the approximation problems, nor between heuristic algos that might not always get the exact optimum, nor FPT. But TheoryCS has different kinds of reductions that can tell you relationships between those things too!
Which makes me wonder if knot genus is hard to approximate...
h/t @CihanPostsThms for their post on the birdsite about knot genus
@joshuagrochow@CihanPostsThms I'll have to look into that further (today is busy for me even if it is short), but I had guessed it would be something of the sort, abd don't know of anything that would provide that sort I'd result. If you arent going to compute knot floer to detect the genus on the nose, there are ways to get lower bounds that are more reasonably computable, ways to get upper bounds that are algorithmic (by algorithmically constructing a Seifert surface).
However, I don't know of things that fail to compute on the nose but provide any guarantee that the upper and lower bounds were reasonably close together like you mention, and it would not surprise me if for a lot of common approaches you could construct knots where the difference/ratio was arbitrarily bad (but that is based on vibes so take with a large grain of salt)
@j2kun@CihanPostsThms I think the algorithm you are referring to only handles pairwise exchanges, not chains and not 3-cycles (or larger). The general problem is a variant of cycle cover.
It seems that UNOS is pretty good about evaluating algorithm & policy changes when they make them, but after a bit of searching I couldn't find the particular data you asked about.
I should write a chatbot for my courses but basically like the Eliza bot... No actual intelligence, it just repeats something like "have you tried reading the documentation?" or "what have you tried so far?" in response to whatever they say.
@Moosader We use Piazza for online student assistance, it's essentially a forum tailored toward classrooms. Posts are numbered on Piazza and can be linked with @ and the post number. For my classes, post 7 is ALWAYS a post that says things like "don't send us screen shots of your terminal", has some guidelines for asking questions that can be answered, tells them how to give us code information, etc. 50% of initial faculty and assistant replies are simply "@7".
@amoroso@troublewithwords Coco Chanel could have told you that. (The story may be apocryphal but the legend has it that before going out, she’d look at herself in the mirror and take one thing off).
Somehow our uni printing backend turned my 6MB PDF into 10 GIGABYTES... How? I have no idea. I had my worst printing experience today and got home with only 80% of what I wanted to print out 💀 It works normally but today (after giving up on uploading and using a USB stick) I had my funds run out mid-printing, then after that had the color run out mid-printing and after that it said I have no funds even though I charged my account again! #print#printing#uni#studying#computerscience#tech