An update of the ten year old data compression challenge. Can your algorithm compress a million random digits?

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I was in Christchurch, New Zealand, recently and had a chance to meet Tim for the first time in person. Tim teaches at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and is Deputy Head of the Computer Science and Software Engineering department. I got a chance to ask him about his work in data compression as well as one of his new areas of interest, Computer Science education.

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One of the great things about C, and even more so for C++, is its strong type checking mechanisms. In general a lot of bugs are caught at compile time, and experienced programmers are able to recognize and fix these types of errors quickly. Unfortunately, there are plenty of places in any C program where [...]

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Back in the day the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was all the rage in the study of linguistics. With apologies to those who actually work in the field, I’ll crudely summarize it as the idea that the language you speak both constrains and influences how you think. The idea says that if your language only has one [...]

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If I had been drawing a paycheck for every hour I spent working on Project Euler’s problem 328, I think my summer vacation would already be paid for. But instead, after a long ten days or so of distraction, I’ll have to settle for the satisfaction of being number 38 or 39 to solve it.

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Newcomers to the world of data compression often stumble on this old idea in hopes of creating a novel and powerful algorithm. In a nutshell, the idea is to create an enumerative coding system that uses combinatorial numbering to identify a message, in hopes of providing a more compact representation . Unfortunately, these schemes always [...]

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This semester I’m teaching a class on Linux/UNIX, and am enjoying it immensely. With every lecture I’m reminded that you simply never stop finding new tools and tricks to use in an O/S that is now well into middle age. One of my midterm questions from last week was a basic query regarding filename expansion [...]

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Microsoft has added a new keyword to C# as part of the 4.0 release earlier this year. Objects that are typed as dynamic bypass normal static type checking, allowing C# to have the flexibility of other scripting languages. This is all well and good, but the headline writers of the blogosphere have taken a decided [...]

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The New York Times has an interesting article today examining the curious fact that certain types of terrorist organizations have an unusually high ratio of engineers among their members. An interesting point to study, no doubt, but what caught my eye was this little blunder: William A. Wulf, a former president of the National Academy [...]

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One of the annoying things that old school Artificial Intelligence researchers have to deal with is the fact that simple brute force is such a daunting foe. Back in the dawn era of the field, attempts to replicate human thought processes used deductive reasoning, symbolic representation, and incremental learning to solve problems. As an example, [...]

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