Category: Uncategorized

Problem Detail: Suppose I’m renaming a file and the electricity goes off right in the middle. Naively, it looks like the file could be in some “half-renamed” state. Maybe the name would have half the old name and half the new Read More …

Problem Detail: I’m reading Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine” where a team at Data General design a new machine (codenamed “Eagle”, later named MV/8000). It is 32-bit extension of a previous architecture (the 16-bit Eclipse). One of the Read More …

Problem Detail: I am trying to solve the following equation using master’s theorem. $T(n) = 3^n T(frac{n} 3) + O(1)$ Extracting the b and $f(n)$ values makes sense they are $b=3$ and $f(n)=1$. I am not sure what my $a$ value Read More …

Problem Detail: This question is inspired by the Bogo-Sort algorithm and the discussion of whether there are any worse sorting algorithms than Bogosort. Assume that $A$ is an array initialized by a random permutation on the set $I_n={1,2,ldots, n}$. Consider the Read More …

Problem Detail: I have read some complexity papers in which “for infinitely many input sizes” is used. What is the difference in the computational complexity context between “for infinitely many input sizes” and “for all input sizes”? Asked By : Jose Antonio Read More …

Problem Detail: Today I heard of BNF which is a language for languages. Also heard that it specifies the entire syntax of C in four pages. So I thought of checking it out. After reading through this page, I got a Read More …

Problem Detail: I would like to understand why and when polynomial algorithms became of interest. When did people realize the role and importance of efficient versus non-efficient algorithms? Did that happen when the concept of an algorithm was discovered, or the Read More …

Problem Detail: Suppose I am given $n$ fixed width integers (i.e. they fit in a register of width $w$), $a_1, a_2, dots a_n$ such that their sum $a_1 + a_2 + dots + a_n = S$ also fits in a register Read More …

Problem Detail: It seems to me that the per-record timeline consistency as defined by Cooper et al. in “PNUTS: Yahoo!’s Hosted Data Serving Platform” mimics the (older?) definition of monotonic writes. From the paper: per-record timeline consistency: all replicas of a Read More …