15 posts found.
April 21, 2017
…personal role model… Image of Harry Lewis courtesy of Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences This past Wednesday, April 19, was a celebration of computer science at Harvard, in honor of the 70th birthday of my undergraduate adviser, faculty colleague, former Dean of Harvard College, baseball...
September 28, 2015
I begin – in continental style, unmotivated and, frankly, gratuitously – by defining Ackerman's function \(A\) over two integers: \[ A(m, n) = \left\{ \begin{array}{l} n + 1 & \mbox{ if $m=0$ } \\ A(m-1, 1) & \mbox{ if $m > 0$ and $n = 0$ } \\ A(m-1, A(m, n-1)) & \mbox{ if $m > 0$ and $n > 0$ } \end{array} \right. \]...
August 10, 2015
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. (NIV Proverbs 16:33) …“Lux et Veritas”… Seal of Yale University image from Wikimedia Commons. The seal of Yale University shows a book with the Hebrew אורים ותמים (urim v’thummim), a reference to the Urim and...
May 07, 2015
…“blockhead” argument… "Blockhead by Paul McCarthy @ Tate Modern" image from flickr user Matt Hobbs. Used by permission. Alan Turing proposed what is the best known criterion for attributing intelligence, the capacity for thinking, to a computer. We call it the Turing Test, and it involves comparing the computer’s verbal...
February 18, 2015
…the huge ledger… The charming town of Guildford, 40 minutes southwest of London on South West Trains, is associated with two famous British logician-mathematicians. Alan Turing (on whom I seem to perseverate) spent time there after 1927, when his parents purchased a home at 22 Ennismore Avenue just outside the...
November 30, 2014
…less histrionic… We seem to be at the “Turing moment”, what with Benedict Cumberbatch, erstwhile Sherlock Holmes, now starring as a Hollywood Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. The release culminates a series of Turing-related events over the last few years. The centennial of Turing’s 1912 birth was celebrated actively...
August 29, 2014
With few exceptions, scholars would be better off writing their papers in a lightweight markup format called Markdown, rather than using a word-processing program like Microsoft Word. This post explains why, and reveals a hidden agenda as well.1 Microsoft Word is not appropriate for scholarly article production …lightweight… “Old two...
June 10, 2014
…that's not Turing's Test… “Turing Test” image from xkcd. Used by permission. There has been a flurry of interest in the Turing Test in the last few days, precipitated by a claim that (at last!) a program has passed the Test. The program in question is called "Eugene Goostman" and...
October 28, 2013
Update March 25, 2019: Wesley Pegden, Ariel D. Procaccia, and Dingli Yu have an elegant working out of the proposal below that they call "I cut, you freeze." Pegden and Procaccia describe it in a Washington Post opinion piece. …how to split a cupcake… “Halves” image by flickr user Julie Remizova. Why...
October 16, 2012
Karen Spärck Jones, 1935-2007 In honor of Ada Lovelace Day 2012, I write about the only female winner of the Lovelace Medal awarded by the British Computer Society for "individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the understanding or advancement of Computing". Karen Spärck Jones was the 2007 winner of...
June 16, 2012
...the Golem... Image of the statue of the Golem of Prague at the entrance to the Jewish Quarter of Prague by flickr user D_P_R. Used by permission (CC-BY 2.0). Alan Turing, the patron saint of computer science, was born 100 years ago this week (June 23). I’ll be attending the...
May 29, 2012
John Tenniel, c. 1864. Study for illustration to Alice's adventures in wonderland. Harcourt Amory collection of Lewis Carroll, Houghton Library, Harvard University. We've just completed spring semester during which I taught a system design course jointly in Engineering Sciences and Computer Science. The aim of ES96/CS96 is to help the students learn...
March 06, 2012
“You seem to believe in fairies.” Photo of the Cottingley Fairies, 1917, by Elsie Wright via Wikipedia. Aficionados of open access should know about the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), an open-access journal in my own research field of artificial intelligence, a subfield of computer science concerned with the...
September 23, 2011
I'm generally a big fan of peer review. I think it plays an important role in the improvement and "chromatography" of the scholarly literature. But sometimes. Sometimes. The Boyer-Moore MJRTY algorithm allows efficient determination of which shape (triangle, circle, square) is in the majority without counting each shape. This past...
March 24, 2010
Fragment of Charles Babbage's first difference engine, from the collection of the Harvard University Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, here is a fragment of Charles Babbage's difference engine, from the Collection of Historical Instruments at Harvard University. Babbage went on to design a programmable...
