P.S. Charles has a blog, and some recent post are about Turing and this book.

[...] a panelist at IPDPS (in Miami, a couple of weeks ago) assert that parallel-processing topics have been disappearing from CS curricula in recent years. As anecdotal evidence, he pointed out the topic’s removal in the 2nd edition of Introduction to Algorithms [...]

The article goes on to give several other examples to prove his point. In the end, Michael wrote

[...] multicore computing platforms are now the norm. Recognizing that reality, let’s make the adjustment time short.

Are we expecting a surge of algorithm and data structure textbooks with an emphasis in multicore?

Andrew Binstock and Donald Knuth converse on the success of open source, the problem with multicore architecture, the disappointing lack of interest in literate programming, the menace of reusable code, and that urban legend about winning a programming contest with a single compilation.

Among other things, he explained why the numbering of Volume 4 fascicles starts at 0 and not 1. (You may recall that there is no Volume 0 and so zero-based counting cannot be exactly the reason. Well, I mean not exactly.)

Algorithms, as closely guarded as state secrets, buy and sell stocks and mortgage-backed securities, sometimes with a dispassionate zeal that crashes markets. Algorithms promise to find the news that fits you, and even your perfect mate.

Perfect!

Among other things, this is how the Economist article begins:

Algorithms sound scary, of interest only to dome-headed mathematicians.

Well, I have no idea what “dome-headed” means, but Google tells me that dome-headed creatures can be scary. Now, domed-head mathematicians… hmm, maybe it has to do with banging the head to the wall?

The 2007 Gödel Prize for outstanding journal articles in theoretical computer science is awarded to:
Alexander A. Razborov and Steven Rudich

for their paper
“Natural Proofs”, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Vol. 55, No. 1, 1997, pp. 24-35.

It was first presented at the Twenty-sixth Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of computing, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 1994, pp. 204 – 213.

I note that Natural Proofs have been written a couple times before on the blogosphere, and I further note that the prize must have been announced at least a week ago from seeing a link into the latter post. Ha!

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/alist.txt

Update: Some stats are available in this post in Geomblog.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~FOCS05/

According to Cliff Stein, there were 432 submissions, of which 135 have been accepted. A comment at Jeff Erickson’s blog reveals that 135 is the maximum that they can fit in 3 days, as discussed in the business meeting last year.

Update: this is the official list on SODA 2006’s web site.

• 17th ACM
  Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures
  (conference program)
• Twenty-Fourth Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS
  Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
  (conference program)

P.S. I made the mistake of booking my flights before actually reading the conference program. Thinking that the conference starts on the 17th, oh well, I booked my flight so that I will arrive in the afternoon of the 16th. No, I really did not plan to spend time in the casinos.

To start, you are referred to the post by Suresh Venkatasubramanian and a slightly later post by Lance Fortnow. Make sure you read the comment by Michael Mitzenmacher for a clarification on the purpose of the task force, directly from a task force member.

Let the message spread.

P.S. Jeff Erickson has an interesting post about basic research funding too.

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Research/focs05/list.htm

The intuition here is that it is saying: “Regarding membership in L, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to bet on one of x or y as belonging to L, my money would be on f(x,y).”

Full information:

Paper: cs.CC/0506082
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:33:51 GMT (100kb,S)

Title: Open Questions in the Theory of Semifeasible Computation
Authors: Piotr Faliszewski and Lane A. Hemaspaandra
Report-no: URCS-TR-2005-872
Subj-class: Computational Complexity
ACM-class: F.1.3
\
The study of semifeasible algorithms was initiated by Selman’s work a quarter
of century ago [Sel79,Sel81,Sel82]. Informally put, this research stream
studies the power of those sets L for which there is a deterministic (or in
some cases, the function may belong to one of various nondeterministic function
classes) polynomial-time function f such that when at least one of x and y
belongs to L, then f(x,y) \in L \cap \{x,y\}. The intuition here is that it is
saying: “Regarding membership in L, if you put a gun to my head and forced me
to bet on one of x or y as belonging to L, my money would be on f(x,y).”
In this article, we present a number of open problems from the theory of
semifeasible algorithms. For each we present its background and review what
partial results, if any, are known.
\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/cs/0506082 , 100kb)

Our proofs reduce online medians to the following online bribery problem: faced with some unknown threshold T>0, an algorithm must submit “bids” b>0 until it submits a bid as large as T. The algorithm pays the sum of its bids. We describe optimally competitive algorithms for online bribery.

I suppose this can be a useful skill when I travel to some parts of the world later this summer?

Full information:

Paper: cs.DS/0504103
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 00:07:32 GMT (58kb)

Title: Online Medians via Online Bribery
Authors: Marek Chrobak and Claire Kenyon and John Noga and Neal E. Young
Comments: extended abstract
Subj-class: Data Structures and Algorithms
ACM-class: G.1.6; G.2.2; F.2.2
\
Following Mettu and Plaxton, we study online algorithms for the k-medians
problem. Such an algorithm must produce a nested sequence F_1\subseteq
F_2\subseteq…\subseteq F_n of sets of facilities. Mettu and Plaxton show that
online metric medians has a (roughly) 40-competitive deterministic
polynomial-time algorithm. We give improved algorithms, including a
(24+\epsilon)-competitive deterministic polynomial-time algorithm and a
5.44-competitive, randomized, non-polynomial-time algorithm.
We also consider the competitive ratio with respect to size. An algorithm is
s-size-competitive} if, for each k, the cost of F_k is at most the minimum cost
of any set of k facilities, while the size of F_k is at most s k. We present
optimally competitive algorithms for this problem.
Our proofs reduce online medians to the following online bribery problem:
faced with some unknown threshold T>0, an algorithm must submit “bids” b>0
until it submits a bid as large as T. The algorithm pays the sum of its bids.
We describe optimally competitive algorithms for online bribery.
Our results on cost-competitive online medians extend to approximately metric
distance functions, online fractional medians, and online bicriteria
approximation.
\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/cs/0504103 , 58kb)

Finally I can hope to try to understand the theorem! And supposedly it uses a purely combinatorial amplification lemma.