Reading List and Rewiring

I am in the middle of rethinking my personal research and to that end debating about how much of my current reading list I should stick to. Here is what I have planned for the next couple of months:

Filed under: Books, Computer Science, DEK, Google, Mathematics, Rants

ASMs and Random Things

Yuri Gurevich from Microsoft Research [1] gave a very erudite and somewhat interesting Google Tech Talk on the Church-Turing thesis today. The reward for patiently listening to a poor video quality H.323 session across the Atlantic at midnight was the discovery of something totally new: Abstract State Machines.

Update (The Video is Up):

Filed under: Computer Science, DEK, Humor

Don Vinci Code

For someone not used to literate programming, CWEB is a pain in the ass. But the dataset that comes with GraphBase makes up for it. Please make CWEB half as much fun as your datasets Don Knuth.

For the illiterate:

Of course the author does not pretend that the location of “highlights” in da Vinci’s painting, one per row and one per column, has any application to art appreciation. However, this program does seem to have pedagogic value, because the relation between pixel values and shades of gray allows us to visualize the data underlying this special case of the assignment problem; ordinary matrices of numeric data are much harder to perceive. The non-random nature of pixels in a work of art may also have similarities to the “organic” properties of data in real-world applications.

(From graphbase/assign_mona.w)

Filed under: DEK, Programming, Rants

Interview with the Don

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856

Filed under: Computer Science, DEK

Notes from Valentine’s Day

Here are the said notes from Knuth’s lecture on Valentine’s Day 2008. There was no specific topic that the Don spoke on. It was more of a Q/A session than a lecture. However there were few short questions and long insightful answers

(A day after the lecture, I did a full transcript which I seem to have misplaced. What follows is a reconstruction from the short-hand notes that I took during the Don’s talk. Due to the peculiar way in which Long-Term memory is reinforced in the human brain, we are capable of making grossly false recollections and delude ourselves into beliving it to be the gospel truth. I have tried best to stick to the words that I took down with no superfluous explanation. But be warned about the limitations of the cerebral cortex. The gist of the ideas and most of the nouns, verbs and adjectives were mostly by the original speaker. But the correctness of pronouns, infinitives, sentence ordering and in general a guarantee of authentic tone are in no way implied.)

Filed under: Computer Science, DEK