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Hey all - I apologize for the (extremely) long period of no updates, I've been prioritizing other things. I've been accepted this Fall to begin my Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley. Since I won't be at Microsoft any longer, I've started a new
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We're entering an era where CPU clock speeds will soon cease to scale upwards and instead CPU manufacturers are planning to put more and more independent cores on a chip. Intel plans to release an 80-core chip within 5 years . Consequently the research
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Most computer scientists are familiar with the P = NP problem, which asks essentially whether we can verify more problems in polynomial time than we can solve. So fundamentally does complexity theory hinge on this result that the Clay Mathematics Institute
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In most data structure and algorithms classes, the model used for basic analysis is the traditional RAM model: we assume that we have a large, random-access array of memory, and count the number of simple reads/writes needed to perform the algorithm.
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I apologize to everyone for the hiatus - I realise a post is more than a little overdue and will try to be more regular in the future. I appreciate the support that I've received for the blog and continuing it. Consider the following problem: you're starting
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One of the benefits of functional languages is their great flexibility in list manipulation, which enables them to express certain computations concisely that would require one or more verbose loops in procedural languages. Many of the features that functional
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Today I'm going to talk about how the quadratic sieve factoring algorithm works, giving a comprehensive description assuming knowledge of only basic university-level mathematics. The foundation of the most popular public-key cryptography algorithm in
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If you've ever done work with Web graphics, I'm sure that at some point you reduced an image with thousands of colors, such as a screenshot or photograph, to an image with only 256 colors, for example to store the image in the GIF format. Remarkably,
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JPEG is an image encoding designed to compress photographs and similar images effectively, often 5 to 15 times over a raw bitmap format. It's a lossy format that exploits properties of human vision to eliminate information that is difficult to distinguish.
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This article will discuss effective use of types to catch some common problems at compile time not normally found by the typechecker. The typechecker is the most important tool in the programmer's arsenal. Types enable you to structure code in a more
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Hi everybody. This is a short post, but I just wanted to tell you all about a new wiki I created called LiteratePrograms , based on an extension of the same MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia . Some of you read my earlier post about literate programming
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Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! Today I'm going to talk about the important problem of successfully tracking dependencies in builds in an automatic manner. In short, there are two kinds of build systems: the ones where all dependencies are tracked successfully
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If asked what they do, some developers might say "I write code" or "I program computers". But more fundamentally, what is computing really about? After all, Euclid's algorithm for computing the greatest common denominator of two numbers in polynomial
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Literate programming , invented in 1981 by the same Donald Knuth who wrote The Art of Computer Programming and the document language TeX, is a technique in which a program is written as a human-oriented document interspersing discussion and code. The
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Most people who have studied algorithms remember quicksort, the ubiquitous sorting algorithm available in the standard library of nearly every programming language implementation in existence, including C, C++, Java, and the .NET Framework. Quicksort
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