Computing Index
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- Checkers has been around for more than 400 years, has been enjoyed by billions of players and has taught generations of young children the joy of strategy. And now it’s all over. This July, Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer scientist at the University of Alberta in Canada, announced that after running a computer program almost nonstop for 18 years, he had calculated the result of every possible endgame that could be played, all 39 trillion of them. He also revealed a sober fact about the game: checkers is a draw. As with tic-tac-toe, if both players never make a mistake, every match will end in a deadlock.
- In the 12th century A.D., when the Arabic treatise “On the Hindu Art of Reckoning” was translated into Latin, the modern decimal system was bestowed on the Western world — an advance that can best be appreciated by trying to do long division with Roman numerals. The name of the author, the Baghdad scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, was Latinized as Algoritmi, which mutated somehow into algorismus and, in English, algorithm — meaning nothing more than a recipe for solving problems step by step.
- It is no accident that Bell Labs was deeply involved with the origins of both analog and digital computers, since it was fundamentally concerned with the principles and processes of electrical communication. Electrical analog computation is based on the classic technology of telephone transmission, and digital computation on that of telephone switching.
- In their persistent quest to breach the Internet’s defenses, the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower. With growing sophistication, they are taking advantage of programs that secretly install themselves on thousands or even millions of personal computers, band these computers together into an unwitting army of zombies, and use the collective power of the dragooned network to commit Internet crimes.
- I've been giving it great deal of thought, and I came up with reasons pointing to the likelihood that Windows is at greater risk of catastrophic attacks. It's not easy reading, but it was either this dense packing or a book-length blog post.
- And now for The Greatest Software Ever Written--Unix.
- Bell Labs often gets credit for creating the Unix operating system, but Bell never funded its development. In fact, the labs' management knew nothing about it. Bell Labs had committed developers to a multivendor project called Multics that made use of many new ideas for an operating system. But the project fell apart, and a Bell Labs participant, Ken Thompson, decided he wanted a personal version of Multics so he could write shoot-'em-up games, says Feldman (who was the No. 7 developer on the AT&T Unix project and is now president of the Association for Computing Machinery).
- The purpose of this little monograph is to assist the programming reader in cleaning up his own thinking, to transmit to him some mental disciplines by sticking to which he can avoid making his job unnecessarily difficult. It is born out of dissatisfaction with the usual kind of programming course, which now strikes me as like the type of driving lessons in which one is taught how to handle a car instead of how to use a car to reach one's destination. This monograph is intended as a complement to such courses; I shall try to present programming —to quote Niklaus Wirth— "as a discipline on its own merits, as a methodology of constructive reasoning applicable to any problem capable of algorithmic solution".
- The creative activity of programming - to be distinguished from coding - is usually taught by examples serving to exhibit certain techniques. It is here considered as a sequence of design decisions concerning the decomposition of tasks into subtasks and of data into data structures. The process of successive refinement of specifications is illustrated by a short but nontrivial example, from which a number of conclusions are drawn regarding the art and the instruction of programming.
- JP: Can you first of all explain the “Free Software Movement.”
- RMS: The basic idea of the Free Software Movement is that the user of software deserves certain freedoms. There are four essential freedoms, which we label freedoms 0 through 3.
- We create wealth for all. Our work, by metrics for conventional software creation, is valued in the billions of dollars. For our reward we ask only that you use our software. If you find it effective, perhaps you will join us in augmenting it.
- I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. For years I worked within the Artificial Intelligence Lab to resist such tendencies and other inhospitalities, but eventually they had gone too far: I could not remain in an institution where such things are done for me against my will.
- Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on the head of a pin?
- Let's see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch across. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the head of the pin is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Therefore, all it is necessary to do is to reduce in size all the writing in the Encyclopaedia by 25,000 times. Is that possible? The resolving power of the eye is about 1/120 of an inch---that is roughly the diameter of one of the little dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopaedia. This, when you demagnify it by 25,000 times, is still 80 angstroms in diameter---32 atoms across, in an ordinary metal.
- Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like “The Matrix”), "experience beaming” (like “Being John Malkovich”), and vastly enhanced human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.
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