Questions tagged [computer-scientists]
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What does the 'W.H.' stand for in 'J.H.W.H. Conway' in Knuth's book Surreal Numbers?
In his book Surreal Numbers Donald Knuth refers to John Horton Conway as J.H.W.H. Conway. The J is for John and the H for Horton, but what about the W and the H? I have searched for Conway's middle ...
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What's the second name of the computer scientist Cliff B. Jones?
The first name of the computer scientist Cliff B. Jones is, apparently, Clifford. What is his second name?
user14234
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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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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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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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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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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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Can we fairly assess Ada Lovelace's talent for mathematics?
Dorothy Stein, a biographer of Ada Lovelace, was pretty blunt in her assessment: Lovelace was a mediocre mathematician, for example see here.
I wonder if she's fair to her. The fact that Lovelace ...
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Was there an intentional purge of all audio recordings of Alan Turing?
The YouTube video Alan Turing's lost radio broadcast rerecorded contains a re-enactment of Alan Turing's lecture broadcast by the BBC.
In the introduction, the narrator (James Grimes, also of the ...
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Did Turing know of Babbage's work?
Did Turing have any knowledge of Babbage's work? Is it known if he ever mentioned Babbage?
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Why is the Halting problem attributed to Alan Turing?
The halting problem is a very famous example from computability theory of a problem that is undecidable. It is often said that the proof of its undecidability was given by Alan Turing, indeed ...
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