Welcome to PGSS 2006!
July 29 FishNet update: In keeping with this year's theme of "delayed awards", we have not yet finished running the 2006 FishNet Tournament. The results will be posted here when available, and the award (a colorful box of Swedish Fish) will be mailed to the lucky winner. Watch this space!
If anyone wants to talk with me one-on-one, send me email.
Tue June 27: The Money Magazine article about software
engineering being the best job in America:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bestjobs/.
(Since College
Professor is second best, maybe I made a bad career move?)
Thu June 29: Not really relevant, but too cool not to mention: I was on the Letterman show (sort of). http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/letterman.html.
Fri June 30: IMPORTANT! The written part of Assignment 0 says "We saw the following problem the first day of class", but we actually didn't see it, because we ran out of time. However, it is available in the online lecture notes and is just the problem of finding a missing card from a deck of cards. The algorithm in the lecture notes is marvelously bad, so you should be able to come up with two better ones.
Tue July 11: One of the students pointed out this cool chess game that shows you what it's thinking about between moves! Very nice. And, it's written in Java!
Tue July 11: Not really relevant, but cool: a movie of the asteroid that flew past the earth last weekend!
Wed July 12: An Inconvenient Truth: Since someone raised this issue in the first class, what Al Gore actually said about the Internet was in fact true!
Thu July 13: If you are a native speaker of North American English, you can participate in real cutting-edge CS research, and get a $10 Amazon gift certificate. More info here.
Mon July 17: The subject of quantum computing was brought up
in class on Friday.
Here is the IBM press release
about demonstrating a seven "qubit" computation for factoring "15"
(the answer they got was 3 x 5).
More recent news is here.
I personally am dubious that this will produce practical benefits, but
theoretically they could achieve fast factoring of very large integers,
thus breaking all the common Internet public key cryptography.
Probably not this year, though.
Quantum computing tutorial is here.
Tue July 18: Fishnet Tournament plans: If you are interested
in trying to win the tournament, you will be able to continue working on your
program for one more week (until Monday July 24), at which point we
will run the tournament and determine the winner.
If the FishNet server should happen to go down at any time, contact a TA and send me email (both). They'll be able
to bring it back up.
The Grand Prize will (probably) be presented at the PGSS Banquet.
The Winner will also have eternal fame for one year on this webpage.
Wed July 19: Just to be clear: you turn in your FishNet contest entry as a further update to your Assignment 2 program, using the usual class webpage mechanism, by 8:15am, Monday, July 24. Cheers.
Fri July 21: There's a good Atlantic Monthly article ("What Global Language?") describing the situation of English in the world that requires a subscription to access, but here it is, for the record. (A Google search for wallraff what global language turns up several pirate copies for free, though.)
Sat July 29: See FishNet update at the top of this page!