All you budding computer scientists our there are no doubt dying for me to resolve last months cliffhanger. As I stated last time, my goal with this series of posts is to describe the PCP Theorem in plain English. The PCP Theorem is a major result in the field of computational complexity, but to really […]
When you visit this blog, your computer sends a message to the computer that hosts this site. That computer, in turn, responds with the priceless content currently being displayed by your web browser. This simple exchange, in essence, is the purpose of the internet; it provides a way for computers talk.
With so very many computers […]
Last month I mentioned that I was helping teach CS 159, a class entitled “Introduction to Computational Complexity”. I also mentioned that my interest in this subject is one of the main reason I ended up majoring in computer science. I didn’t, however, get a chance to explain what computational complexity is. Now that the […]
Since the beginning of last week, I’ve been busy teaching my advisor’s class on computational complexity. Complexity theory isn’t really my area of research, but it’s definitely one of the reasons I became a computer science major. When the class is over I plan on blogging about some of the topics. People seem to have […]
Ah to travel from the smallest state to the biggest state and back again. Actually I’m well aware that Alaska, not Texas, is the biggest state, and also I’m not back in Rhode Island yet, but hey, that’s my lead, live with it. I’ll really be back in Providence on thursday, although then it’s off […]
Next time you’re wandering through the hallways of your local computer science department, just, you know, soaking in the atmosphere, you’ll no doubt feel compelled to read the various nerdy comics that students, professor and administrators have chosen to cut out and paste on their office doors (hopefully you like Dilbert). As a CS grad […]
First off, since I already mentioned web-based photoshop, here’s an update (don’t worry, there’s a video, you won’t need to read anything).
Second, here’s a hot video demoing some content-aware image resizing research first presented at SIGGRAPH 2007. It’s a fairly simple idea that works surprisingly well.
Normally when you shrink an image you either make […]
Today on Freakonomics, Steven Levitt describes an alternative way to do multiplication. It’s also explained in this Wikipedia entry. Basically it’s a way of doing multiplication in binary (meaning base 2), even though you start with numbers written in base 10. In other words, you write one number as a sum of powers of 2 […]
After all my recent talk of Ferrets and Pinkberry, it’s high time for something more technical. Here is a puzzle my housemate told me about a month ago. Below the fold is my computer science style derivation of the answer.
A young man is committed to marry one of three identical sisters. Despite their genetic similarity, […]
A few weeks ago I alluded to an amazing computer science class I took in which we tried to identify a car from some extremely poor surveillance video. In movies and TV shows enhancing video is a snap, but for some reason just typing “enhance” while watching the video didn’t work on our machines. Instead […]