Questions tagged [computer-science]
For questions about the scientific approach to computations and its applications.
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Where did the earliest Turing machine undecidability proofs appear?
It is common in any theoretical computer science textbook or class to prove the undecidability of various decision problems for Turing machines. It is often claimed that Turing himself established the ...
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Where does this quotation attributed to Turing actually originate from?
Many sources (e.g. Wikiquote, referencing a 2012 Guardian article) attribute the following quote to Alan Turing:
A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into ...
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From where did the term "context-free" originate?
In Greibach's survey Formal Languages: Origins and Directions, she writes the following paragraph on page 19 about the term "context-free":
The theory of context-free languages was being ...
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Does Henry Rice's doctoral dissertation exist online?
Henry Gordon Rice is perhaps best known for Rice's theorem, which states that any non-trivial semantic property of Turing machines is undecidable. In a footnote to his Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. article (...
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What does Dijkstra mean with his title "on the cruelty of really teaching computing science"?
That's EWD 1036. What does he mean by "really teaching"? And also, what is the cruelty implied in "really teaching" it?
The title is a bit obscure after you read his paper. Such ...
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Help With Understanding of Constants in Zeller's Congruence
If this would be better suited over on the Mathematics Exchange, please move it appropriately. I thought I would start here for the history type aspect
Background
I'm currently working as a Data ...
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What factors make a technology grow exponentially over time? (e.g., as in Moore's Law)
We all know Moore's Law, namely that computing power grows exponentially. The specific statement of Moore's Law had to do withe the doubling time (2 years) of the number of transistors in a ...
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Who coined the term "signal-to-noise ratio" and when did statisticians start using the term "noise" to describe randomness?
I'm writing about the history of the concept of noise and am having trouble tracking down references from when the term "noise" started being associated with statistical noise such as ...
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Who invented bit permutations like shuffle, butterfly and bit-reversal?
This question is about a class of periodic permutations,that are produced by applying finite permutations to the binary digits of all integers.
In lack of a better name, they shall be called bit ...
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What are some examples of galactic algorithms that have become practical?
On the Wikipedia article for galactic algorithm (an algorithm that only becomes efficient when the inputs are so large that the algorithm is not used in practice), one of the use cases is that
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When did mathematical logic start being applied in/ with computer science?
I am going through articles about Turing machines which were introduced to solve the entscheidung problem by Alan Turing in 1936. To what I understand, all modern computers are essentially Turing ...
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How the present technology influences the way history of science is done?
Heard recently about digital humanities as a new paradigm of inquiry into the history of mankind and other humanities. Is the historiography of science informed by technological advances that could ...
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Historical examples of frauds discovered because someone tried to mimic a uniform random sequence
So, I'm preparing a talk about the well known fact that humans are bad at the task of generating uniformly random sequences of numbers when asked to do so.
I would like to spice the talk a bit by ...
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What was Gauss's algorithmic method to solve a certain "nearest neighbour search" problem in multi-dimensional euclidean space?
In his 1829 paper on a new formulation of mechanics, Gauss presented his principle of least constraint, which parallels previous formulations of analytical mechanics and provides a new point of view ...
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What effect were used for manufacturing HDD before 1988?
I understand Hard disk present before 1988
and I came to know that Giant magnetoresistance effect used in applications in Hard Disk manufacturing and this effect is discovered in 1988
So what effect ...
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How were contour plots of complex functions produced in the days of mechanical differential analyzers?
I was reading an old paper (specifically, the first appearance of the Pearcey function, here) and I was struck by the beauty of the plots it contains, particularly for a paper from 1945-46:
Pearcey ...
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Has Turing's invention of Turing machines contributed to the development of real computers?
Has Turing's invention of Turing machines contributed to the development of real computers, which resulted in the personal computers we currently use?
I often saw it mentioned that this is an ...
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What is the source of Donald Knuth's remark about naming programming languages?
(This question toes the line between belonging here and belonging on the Retrocomputing Stack Exchange.)
Here is the quote; sometimes the first sentence is omitted:
The most important thing in a ...
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Derek Oppen and the Nelson-Oppen combination procedure
Derek Oppen was a student of Stephen Cook known for the Nelson-Oppen combination of decision procedures method. Yet, there is no Wikipedia entry dedicated to him and his publication list extends ...
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What was the first automated theorem prover?
From a lot of googling, it seems like the answer might be "Mizar", but I am not completely sure.
What was (or is?) the first automated theorem prover (i.e. not necessarily active right now)?
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Are there other articles by Ada Lovelace than translation of Menabrea's notes on Analytical Engine?
Ada Lovelace is well known as an translator of Luigi's Menabrea article on Babbage's Analytical engine. She also added notes to the translation which are in the end longer than the translation itself. ...
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Where does the term "arm's-length recursion" come from?
I've recently seen the term "arm's-length recursion" for a recursive method with a check that short-circuits the method's true or intended base case. What's the origin of this term? How did ...
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The mathematics of multiple values
tl;dr
Why has the array paradigm, which emerged in the 1950s and 60s amongst mathematicians, and which underpins certain programming languages, apparently failed to capture and maintain interest ...
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How did von Neumann come up with his merge sort algorithm?
Since merge sort is the first $O(n \log n)$ time general purpose sorting algorithm I find it rather surprising that it was discovered without having any obvious conceptual predecessors. Are there any ...
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Where does the term "pivot" come from in the quicksort algorithm?
The quicksort algorithm is based on recursively choosing an element to partition the array. In every modern exposition that I've seen, this element is called the "pivot".
However, as far as ...
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What is Holon Programming?
Donald Knuth credits Pierre-Arnoul de Marneffe's idea of "Holon Programming" as the main influence on Literate Programming. See page 13 of "Literate Programming", Knuth's paper ...
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Was Charles Sanders Peirce aware of Charles Babbage's difference engine?
Is there any indication that Charles Peirce was aware of Babbage and his work on mechanical computing?
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Who were the major thinkers before Turing to ask whether machines can think? How come Turing's Test lasted as the influential one?
Turing Test has often been referred to both in academia and outside it when talking about AI. Yet there were I suppose many more thinkers except for Turing, possibly Descartes among them, that dealt ...
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Early parallel computing with human exchanging messages: is this story true?
As a student in applied maths, I can remember being told that in the 1940s there were early attempts of parallel computing not using any machine but only human calculation power.
I believe the story ...
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Was a work of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage inspiration for pioneers of modern computing?
Recently, I came across a book about Grace Hopper where it is stated that Howard Aiken wanted her to become familiar with papers by Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage as he considered some of Babbage's ...
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Does Blum's speedup theorem have any conceptual predecessors?
Blum's speedup theorem seems to me that bears at least some superficial resemblance to Gödel's research on the length of proofs under certain axiomatic systems.
Does Blum's speedup theorem have any ...
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What happened to cybernetics?
Recently, I've been looking into the life of the brilliant Norbert Wiener and the field he spawned, cybernetics. Before reading into it, I thought "cybernetics" was a pseudo-science-new-wave-...
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Why so hard to find references to pictures of Raymond Boyce?
Raymond Boyce was one of the first pioneers of the relational database and a co-developer of SQL, yet it is almost impossible to find any pictures of him:
https://www.google.com/search?q=raymond+f+...
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How did Yao come up with his minimum spanning tree algorithm?
I recently stumbled upon this text about Yao's algorithm for the minimum spanning tree (MST) and I was wondering if there are some preceding algorithms (other than Sollin's algorithm) that were ...
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Did Kolmogorov complexity influence the development of communication complexity?
I was reading a wikipedia article about communication complexity and it seems to me that it bears some resemblance to Kolmogorov complexity.
Was the founder of communication complexity influenced by ...
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Origins and reason for Volume A and B divide in Theoretical Computer Science
At some point in history, theoretical computer science emerged as a sub-discipline of computer science. Later, apparently it segregated into "volume A" work and "volume B" work. This can be seen for ...
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Origin of O/L for false/true in German computer-science texts
In Konrad Zuse's Plankalkül ZIA ID 0020 from 1972, in his patent submission Z23624 "Rechenmaschine" ZIA ID 0177 from 1936 and modern German Wikipedia article on the dyadic system, 2020-01-17 we see L ...
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When did the study of the rate of convergence of algorithms begin?
I was reading a book about computational complexity theory and the author made a claim that the study of time complexity of algorithms started with a result on the upper bound on the number of ...
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What is the first reference to a nondeterministic Turing machine?
I am looking for the first reference of a Nondeterministic Turing machine. There is no mention of them in the 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers."
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When did computer pioneers realize that some problems are intrinsically hard?
In my theory computation class, I was told that early computer pioneers didn't realize that some problems are intrinsically hard—what we now call NP-hard problems. Instead, it took a while to realize ...
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Can you provide pages 7, 8, 25 of the 1969 edition of the Art of Computer Programming?
A paper published in 1975 references The Art of Computer Programming (then published in 1969), so it's probably the first edition. I can't even find this edition for sale anywhere. Would you be so ...
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Is there a reason $⊑$ in CSP is analogous to $⊇$ (as opposed to $⊆$)?
The 'square' subset symbols are sometimes used to express analogous concepts to subsets, like prefixes or suffixes.
However their use in CSP seems to be counterintuitive to their shape: $⊑$ appears ...
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What is the origin of "banana brackets"?
"Banana" brackets are used to denote catamorphisms:
Another notation found in the literature is .
These symbols are very similar to the composition of a $($ and a $|$, is this similarity ...
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How did Lenna become the most used image in image processing?
$Lenna$ despite being an playboy model posing nude here and there, is one of the most used images for image processing. How she came into the world of image processing?
Was it done intentionally by ...
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When has the notion of "programming language for machines" emerged?
Nowadays, it seems just common sense to write a program in a high-level programming language and let it be compiler (or interpreted) into machine code to run a computer. However, when did the ...
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Why would Margaret Hamilton and her team at NASA print the code on paper?
This famous photo depicts Margaret Hamilton, leader of the software engineering team for the Apollo Project, next a print out of the code she and her team wrote for the mission.
This information is ...
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Why was the 'differential entropy' from information theory so named?
The entropy of a distribution $p$ on a discrete set $\mathcal{X}$ is defined as $$H(p) = -\sum_{x \in \mathcal{X}} p_x \log p_x.$$ Shannon in his classic paper [1] defines the analogue for continuous ...
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In left- or right-rotation for arrays, where did those conventions for the directions come from?
This is a repost from another exchange.
I was going to write a paper about code to rotate elements in an array, but I realized I have no idea why rotation towards the start of the array is “left” ...
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What technologies were used before JavaScript?
I made a small research about the history before JavaScript was available to use, but I couldn't find much. I only found several plugins that was used, such as Adobe Flash, ActiveX.
So, what I want ...
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Where is the first reference to the "Z combinator", a call-by-value fix-point combinator?
I'd like to know the earliest reference to the Z-combinator. This could be either where the name was first coined, or even the first discussion of a need for an applicative-order Y combinator. I didn'...
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