Questions tagged [computer-science]
For questions about the scientific approach to computations and its applications.
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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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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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Was the Vigenère cipher broken many years before Kasiski?
The Vigenère cipher was broken by Kasiski in 1863 but I read novels and romans from older time, for example during the French Revolution where a student broke Vigenère cipher.
Is it likely that ...
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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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Frege alluded to a logic algorithm?
Somewhere (I wish I remember where) I read that Gottlob Frege, although he didn't invent a logic algorithm, alluded to one (the Quine–McCluskey algorithm? something else? converting truth tables to ...
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Did amateurs ever produce important proofs or similar?
Background
Mathematics and some areas of physics and computer science have the peculiar appeal that some problems and results are easy to understand and it is conceivable that somebody armed with ...
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Serendipitous discoveries in Mathematics and Computer Science
I have recently been reading about serendipitous discoveries in science and I found them quite inspiring. Most of those discoveries are in Chemistry. I'm looking for examples of these kinds of ...
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When was the first appearance of the abbreviation RSA?
When was the first publication of the abbreviation RSA (Rivest, Sharmir, Adleman) because it does not appear in Martin Gardner’s article of 1977 which is at the following url:
https://simson.net/ref/...
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When was the Server Side Include feature of web servers first made available?
Server Side Include (SSI) is a specific concept and related feature of web servers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
When was this feature first introduced?
The Wikipedia ...
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What is the first historical reference to the binary search algorithm?
Most of you know what I mean, but I will define it broadly: the binary search algorithm consists in searching iteratively for an element within an ordered set, by asking yes/no questions that will ...
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Gentzen and computer science
This is a cross-post from mathstack:
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2584003/gentzen-and-computer-science?noredirect=1#comment5333947_2584003
I would like to learn a bit about the ...
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How was the "train on 70% of data" convention established?
It's common in machine learning to train on 70% of non-validation data, testing on the remaining 30%. I'm not sure whether the motive for this is theoretical or "empirically this works well", although ...
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Why is $\eta$ used in $\eta$-conversion?
In lambda calculus there are three types of reduction,
$\alpha$-renaming
$\beta$-reduction
$\eta$-conversion
The use of $\eta$ in $\eta$-conversion seems rather strange to me. Since they already ...
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Tri-nary processor?
Every now and then, I run across a rumor of the Soviets building a tri-nary processor, way back when. But I can never find a source beyond the infamous guy who knows a guy...
The idea is interesting,...
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Etymology of 'qubit'; is there any relation to cubits?
Whilst several not-very-authoritative sources e.g. Wikipedia state that the word qubit was derived, partially, as a play on the word cubit (obviously it also stands for 'quantum bit'), is there any ...
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Entscheidungsproblem vs. Unvollständigkeitssatz
The first term is used by Hilbert in his 1928 work, but in Gödel's later work, the same thing is referred to as Unvollständigkeitssatz ("incompleteness theorem"). For today's German CS researchers, it ...
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What did Tim-Berners Lee mean with "HTTP also allows index search" in his paper "World wide web: The Information Univesrse"?
For my work on the history of hypertext systems and the WWW I cam across one sentence on the development of HTTP which I don't understand and where I could not find any information about:
Page 55: (...
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What is the relationship between constructivism and object oriented programming?
I am exploring the topic of constructivism from discreet math, and think it is related to object oriented programming. Can anyone confirm or deny the two are related?
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history of backpropagation
Has anybody read or have access to
Alex Andrew
Significance Feedback in Neural Nets
Report of Biological Computer Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL
GM-10718-03
TR No 5
September ...
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Did Albert Einstein write a computer program?
I am curious whether or not Albert Einstein wrote a computer program. Did he write a computer program?
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Who developed Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and applied it to machine learning?
I searched about GMM (Gaussian mixture model), but only found that normal distribution was invented by Carl Friedrich Gauss. I'd like to know who contributed to the development of GMM itself, and to ...
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What was the first programming language that implemented hash maps / dictionaries as a base type?
I'm having a discussion elsewhere about this. I suspect that it was Perl, with the hash maps, but that is because I don't know much about older languages rather than any exhaustive research on the ...
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Who said “Either you speak maths or you speak nonsense?”
I am in the process of preparing a lecture and remember that some of the Gods (highly esteemed researchers of the past) said, “Either you speak maths or you
speak nonsense.” Perhaps is was “Either you ...
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What did Dijkstra think about Monte Carlo algorithms?
In A Discipline of Programming, Dijkstra wrote:
Two circumstances have changed the scene since then.* The one is the insight that, even in the case of fully deterministic machines, program testing ...
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Why were so many artificial intelligence founders so optimistic?
1954: The Georgetown experiment in 1954 involved fully automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English. The authors claimed that within three or five years, machine translation ...
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How many computers are there?
There are about 7.13 billion humans alive today.
When installing Java, it says that 3 billion devices run Java. The question is, out of how many? How many computing devices that have enough ...
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Where did the divide and conquer method for radix conversion come from?
While doing the tedious work of documenting my software I tried to find the original source of the divide and conquer method for the conversion of numbers of one base to a number in another base (...
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Who created Agile programming and why?
I semi-recently went to work for a workplace that employs Agile development instead of Waterfall. I have my own reasons for appreciating it, but who was the original creator of Agile? What problems ...
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History of computing/computation in higher education
A Google search for the first academic computer science program a couple of years ago cited a half-dozen programs in France and England that were considered proto-computer science. Current searches ...
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Was the computer invented through the influence of the printing press or through the influence of the calculator?
I was going through the documentation of the manual page in the Linux Operating System, when, I encountered the term "typesetting".
I surfed the web for answers and found it in Wikipedia.
But I am ...
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When was the first command-line interface developed?
I want to know what the first command-line interface was, and when it was. That is, the first time one could type in a command on a keyboard or similar, and receive feedback via a screen or ...
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Is anything known about part II of John McCarthy's Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine Part II?
I know that Part I was published while John McCarthy was working at MIT in 1960, in which he describes the LISP language, which he had invented 2 years prior, and is today considered one of the most ...
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Did Walter Pitts refuse to allow his name to be made publicly available?
I read on the Wikipedia page on Walter Pitts that :
Pitts was also described as an eccentric, refusing to allow his name
to be made publicly available. He refused all offers of advanced
...
Danu♦
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What's the etymology of an engineering/software bug?
I read the Wikipedia page on Software bugs. It does have a section on its etymology. Albeit interesting it doesn't answer my question but merely notes that the term bug was used in 1878:
Use of the ...
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Did Turing ideas make any impact on Psychology or Brain Science? Why?
Some authors, namely Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter, argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious (Hofstadter, D. R., & Dennett, D. C. (2006). The Mind's ...
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How certain is it that Lucas invented the Towers of Hanoi puzzle?
Wikipedia is unequivocal:
The puzzle was invented by the French mathematician Édouard Lucas in 1883.
I have no reason to doubt this, but given the many legends surrounding the topic,
I wonder if ...
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Was the take off of neural computing research in the 80's due to Japan?
Chow, Tommy WS, and John Sum. "Guest editorial: special issue on the emerging applications of neural networks." Neural Computing & Applications 20.7 (2011): 923-924. says:
The take off of ...
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