For questions about the scientific approach to computations and its applications.
Computer science can be applied to the natural sciences by creating simulations of natural processes to determine results too complex to be found by humans alone.
Questions tagged [computer-science]
90 questions
11
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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 seminal papers withing Computer Science. However,…
PandaConda
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10
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The origin of logic gate symbols
Who first proposed the distinctive shapes and the rectangular shape labels?
What is the consideration behind the shapes and the labels?
Hao Chen
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10
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1 answer
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 teleprinter, as opposed to entering commands via paper…
Ne Mo
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10
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What is the first reference to a nondeterministic Turing machine?
I am looking for the first reference of a Nondeterministic Turing machine. There is no mention of them in the 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers."
vy32
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8
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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 matter. The wikipedia article says that the data…
Kevin
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7
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What is Holon Programming?
Donald Knuth credits Pierre-Arnoul de Marneffe's idea of "Holon Programming" as the main influence on Literate Programming. See page 13 of "Literate Programming", Knuth's paper introducing the concept. Knuth calls de Marneffe's work "pioneering" and…
texdr.aft
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6
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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 were they hoping to solve with it?
Carlos Bribiescas
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5
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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 correct according to this Skeptics SE post and…
user2723984
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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 somebody have broken the code before Kasiski or is it…
user4698
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5
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1 answer
Why so hard to find references to pictures of Raymond Boyce?
Raymond Boyce was one of the first pioneers of the relational database and a co-developer of SQL, yet it is almost impossible to find any pictures of…
Joe Harris
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4
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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: (bold marking from me)
A new search and retrieve…
Christoph S
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3
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2 answers
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 actually confused over how the computer came into…
Greentiger
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2
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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” and “right” goes towards the end. I’ve seen…
CTMacUser
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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 is hardly helpful. As I have now said many times…
Geremia
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2
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Origins and reason for Volume A and B divide in Theoretical Computer Science
At some point in history, theoretical computer science emerged as a sub-discipline of computer science. Later, apparently it segregated into "volume A" work and "volume B" work. This can be seen for example at the Handbook of Theoretical Computer…
Hermann Gruber
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