Problem Detail: Since buying computation power is much affordable than in the past, are the knowledge of algorithms and being efficient getting less important? It’s clear that you would want to avoid an infinite loop, so, not everything goes. But if Read More …
Category: Uncategorized
Not all Red-Black trees are balanced?
Problem Detail: Intuitively, “balanced trees” should be trees where left and right sub-trees at each node must have “approximately the same” number of nodes. Of course, when we talk about red-black trees*(see definition at the end) being balanced, we actually mean Read More …
Data structure with search, insert and delete in amortised time $O(1)$?
Problem Detail: Is there a data structure to maintain an ordered list that supports the following operations in $O(1)$ amortized time? GetElement(k): Return the $k$th element of the list. InsertAfter(x,y): Insert the new element y into the list immediately after x. Read More …
Efficiently calculating minimum edit distance of a smaller string at each position in a larger one
Problem Detail: Given two strings, $r$ and $s$, where $n = |r|$, $m = |s|$ and $m ll n$, find the minimum edit distance between $s$ for each beginning position in $r$ efficiently. That is, for each suffix of $r$ beginning Read More …
Trigonometry in computer science
Problem Detail: What’s the use of studying trigonometry in computer science? I mean, is it essential? Does it have a specific application in computer science? Because I can’t seem to muster enough motivation for learning it. Asked By : The Double-Jointed Prince Read More …
How does an NFA use epsilon transitions?
Problem Detail: In the picture below, I’m trying to figure out what exactly this NFA is accepting. What’s confusing me is the $epsilon$ jump at $q_0$. If a $0$ is entered, does the system move to both $q_0$ and $q_1$ (the Read More …
Is there a more intuitive proof of the halting problem’s undecidability than diagonalization?
Problem Detail: I understand the proof of the undecidability of the halting problem (given for example in Papadimitriou’s textbook), based on diagonalization. While the proof is convincing (I understand each step of it), it is not intuitive to me in the Read More …
Finding constants C and k for big-O of fraction of polynomials
Problem Detail: I am a teaching assistant on a course for computer science students where we recently talked about big-O notation. For this course I would like to teach the students a general method for finding the constants $C$ and $k$ Read More …
Why are so many internet protocols text-based?
Problem Detail: From what I have found, a very large amount of protocols that travel over the internet are “text-based” rather than binary. The protocols in question include, but are not limited to HTTP, SMTP, FTP (I think this one is Read More …
Ternary processing instead of Binary
Problem Detail: Most of the computers available today are designed to work with binary system. It comes from the fact that information comes in two natural form, true or false. We humans accept another form of information called “maybe” 🙂 I Read More …
