Tags / 13 quotes from 5 sources
#computer-science
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Shannon and the birth of the bit
A binary digit can be in one of two states. And this is the basis of the “bit”—which is a shortening of “binary digit”: 0 or 1. The information contained in a bit is a measure of how likely it is that the digit is one or zero. With all the talk about infinity so far, it should…
The sentence that invented bits
the sentence that is responsible for the conceptual framework that gave rise to computing. Shannon writes, “If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits.”
The Byzantine Generals Problem
The Microsoft scientist Leslie Lamport captured the fundamental problem of achieving reliable consensus in distributed control systems with a beautiful and intuitive metaphor in the early 1980s. In a landmark paper called “The Byzantine Generals Problem,” Lamport described what…
Four generals for Byzantine fault tolerance
divisions surround an enemy camp. After observing the enemy, the generals must communicate among themselves and come to consensus on a plan of action. They must decide whether to attack or retreat. If they all agree to attack, they win. If they all agree not to attack, they…
A majority vote among the generals
The solution would be to have each of the four generals exchange information with the other generals and take a majority vote to select which data that has been exchanged is correct.
Bitcoin solves the Byzantine Generals Problem
If the Byzantine Generals problem sounds familiar to you, it might be because Bitcoin relies on a solution to exactly this problem to verify the authenticity of transactions and bitcoins. A mysterious programmer (or group of programmers) called Satoshi Nakamoto released the…
Information as resurgent Platonism
“I am aware that in this information-centered era, many scientists and philosophers are bamboozled by the idea that information lies at the bottom of reality. It is nothing more than a resurgence of Platonism supported by the social and economic power of computer science and…
Hamlet On The Holodeck
The invention of eliza
In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at MIT, create, as an experiment in natural language processing, a computer program called ELIZA that carried on a conversation by replying to typed-in statements with printed words. [...] The resulting persona, Eliza…
Historical Event-based Access To Museum Collections
Modeling events
Even our central concept, event, is treated differently by the parties involved in our project; in the history domain, the notion of an event has been defined as “what agents make happen or undergo”[2]. This has the implication that actions are a species of events. Furthermore…
Sharing terminology
A clear definition of the shared terminology is a prerequisite for successful multidisciplinary collaboration. This need is particularly pressing within collaborative projects in the field of cultural heritage and computer science such as ours as each field has different…
Information Science - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Information science is an interdisciplinary field which predates computer science
Information science is an interdisciplinary field primarily concerned with the analysis, collection, classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of information.[1] Practitioners within the field study the application and usage of…
Thesauri Of Historical Periods – A Proposal For Standardization.
Spatial reasoning
Spatial reasoning (through region-based theories that mirror interval-based theories) has been done by (Cohn, Bennett, Gooday and Gotts 1997). In addition, there is considerable research and development into spatiotemporal databases (e.g. Koubarakis, Sellis. et al. 2003) to…
Temporal reasoning that ignores space
On one side, computer science concentrates on temporal reasoning in controlled industrial environments, typically using discrete events and time intervals, neglecting spatiotemporal dependencies (e.g. Theodoulidis and Loucopoulos 1991, Ligozat and Vila 1998, Cowley and…