| Sunday, September 27th, 2009 |
| 2:55 pm |
Once again from the "Welcome to the future..." department. Segway is all well and good, but this is pure future shock: Luke armThey have a neural interface at this point. The arm is in wide clinical trials with the US military. |
| Thursday, September 10th, 2009 |
| 8:51 pm |
From the 'Welcome to the future' department... Using Neural Measures of Economic Value to Solve the Public Goods Free-Rider Problem. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1177302Briefly, these people apply pattern classification algorithms to fMRI data to determine whether the value a person assigns to something is what he or she actually believes the value to be. Not quite a lie detector, but conceptually in the same category. Anybody else find this development mildly disturbing? |
| Monday, August 31st, 2009 |
| 11:54 am |
Лилипуты... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8226509.stm"Alan Turing is most famous for his code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during WWII, ... However he also made significant contributions to the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and computing." "However"? |
| Thursday, August 13th, 2009 |
| 12:37 am |
"Six is a number perfect in itself, and not because God created the world in six days; rather the contrary is true. God created the world in six days because this number is perfect, and it would remain perfect, even if the work of the six days did not exist." St. Augustine, 'De Civitate Dei' |
| Sunday, June 28th, 2009 |
| 5:43 pm |
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| Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 |
| 1:00 am |
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| Saturday, February 28th, 2009 |
| 11:18 pm |
Suppose you are given a language called C--. It is just like C, except there is no if, no switch, and no tertiary operator: i.e. no conditionals of any kind. Can we write all the same programs in it as in, say, C or C++, and if so, how? To make the problem more interesting, suppose we also remove all the loop constructs? I think I will ask this in interviews. |
| Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 |
| 12:39 am |
Tales from interviews Me: Please describe an algorithm you would use to search for a particular value in a sorted array. Candidate (MS in CS): <in fits and starts, describes and writes pseudo code for binary search> Me: What is the running time of this algorithm in terms of O-notation? Candidate: <brightly> n^2 Me: <falling of a chair> Pardon?.. Candidate: no, wait.. That would have to be 2^n Me: <chokes on coffee> Fini |
| Friday, February 13th, 2009 |
| 12:59 am |
A puzzle with a most elegant solution. Two people play a game. On your turn, you pick up a number 1 through 9 without replacement. To win, one needs to collect three numbers that sum to 15. Describe the optimal strategy. |
| Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 |
| 1:38 am |
Tales from interviews Me: Please describe a class design for a deck of cards, say for something like an online casino. Candidate: <very quickly produces a design in which Players publicly inherit from Cards> Me: ... ?!?.. Немая сцена |
| Sunday, February 8th, 2009 |
| 11:41 pm |
Came upon this. Lots of short interviews with some of the people who made the 20th century. Hans Bethe, Mandelbrot, Don Knuth, Gell-Mann, John Wheeler, Josh Maynard Smith, Francis Crick, Edward Teller, Atiyah, etc. http://www.peoplesarchive.com/home.jsp |
| Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 |
| 2:47 pm |
Observations on interviewing: - over 3/4 of all candidates with C/C++ on the resume cannot reverse a linked list in those languages (in place)
- over 1/3 cannot do it in principle, in any language or by any method, with multiple tries
- over 1/2 have no concept of how to reverse digits in a number without converting the said number to a string
- the above holds regardless of the degree; if anything, Masters in Computer Science do worse on average. (I regard MS as a red flag at this point).
- candidates who declare Java as their preferred programming language in general have a weaker grasp of algorithms and little to no idea of architecture :( |
| Monday, December 15th, 2008 |
| 1:15 pm |
In Febraury of last year, when I was looking for a job, I passed my resume to somebody at Akamai at a career fair. Yesterday I got a letter from them: "We got your resume and would like to invest time (sic.) in evaluation of your skills." I think it might be some sort of record. A year and ten months. |
| Sunday, December 7th, 2008 |
| 5:03 pm |
Who'd have thought it possible. "In recent work that is nothing short of spectacular, X. Leroy has developed a formally verified compiler for the C programming language." Thomas C. Hales, "Formal Proof", Notices of the AMS, December 2008 (55, 11), p. 1377 |
| Monday, November 24th, 2008 |
| 12:31 am |
A source of morality, indeed. Against religion( I quote: )Granted, correlation is not causation, and the statistical analysis in the article is nonexistent. But even the correlations are interesting, and are a touch counterintuitive to people. Also, Jensen, Journal of Religion & Society 8: 1–14. |
| Monday, November 10th, 2008 |
| 12:17 pm |
I, for one, welcome our Democratic Overlords.
Undo |
| Thursday, May 8th, 2008 |
| 1:54 am |
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| Friday, March 7th, 2008 |
| 4:30 pm |
Неплохо сказано о компьютерных шахматах: "Writing about a 262-move optimal ‘rook and knight versus two knights’ game [Ken] Thompson found in the 6-piece endgames, former championship chess player Tim Krabbé explained: Playing over these moves is an eerie experience. They are not human; a grandmaster does not understand them any better than someone who has learned chess yesterday. The knights jump, the kings orbit, the sun goes down, and every move is the truth. It's like being revealed the Meaning of Life, but it's in Estonian. On Thompson's Website, where this and other endgame databases can be found, he has named the link to them: 'Play Chess with God.'" ( отсюда) Это более-менее совпадает с моим собственным опытом, но: в партиях, скажем, Крамника против Deep Fritz этот эффект либо вовсе отсутствует, либо сильно менее заметен. Несколько гроссмейстеров пошли даже на то чтобы сказать что в этих партиях компьютер "passed the chess Turing test": игру было невозможно отличить от игры человека. Надо полагать это разница между доказуемо оптимальными решениями и heuristic search. |
| Friday, February 23rd, 2007 |
| 1:25 am |
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| Monday, July 31st, 2006 |
| 1:35 am |
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