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nutwani91on The Algorithm Still Running Your GPS: Edsger Dijkstra and His Impact on CS

Week 07 of the Turing Award Series: shortest paths, semaphores, and why testing was never enough.

I am sure every CS student has heard of Dijkstra and his algorithm for finding the shortest path. What is relatively less well known is his invention of semaphores and his push toward proving code correct, not just testing and debugging it. This chapter took me a while because there is so much Dijkstra contributed to computer science, and he did it in an idiosyncratic way.

I have read this quote so many times and never knew it was attributed to Dijkstra: "Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence."

Code, a runnable demo, and the full writeup: https://github.com/nirmal91/turing-award-series/tree/main/07...

nutwani91on A Man Who Named AI: John McCarthy and the End of the Code–Data Divide

Week 06 of the Turing Award Series: how one person got machines to generate new facts instead of just calculating.

Tracing some history of artificial intelligence, I was looking forward to this chapter. John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. He is also directly or indirectly responsible for Lisp, macros, garbage collection, time sharing, and code as data. He is the quintessential computer scientist.

After 20+ years of writing code, I finally wrote Lisp for the first time.

Code and full writeup: https://github.com/nirmal91/turing-award-series/tree/main/06...

nutwani91on The Math Under Every AI Model: James Wilkinson and Backward Error

Week 05 of the Turing Award Series - how to tell if a bad answer is the algorithm's fault or the input problem's?

Forward errors are hard to compute in general because you need the right answer and then do the subtraction, but backward errors are much easier to compute. It’s how much you have to nudge the inputs to make your answer exactly right.

Code, a runnable demo, and the full writeup: https://github.com/nirmal91/turing-award-series

nutwani91on Marvin Minsky: a proof that led to the first AI winter

Week 04 of the Turing Award Series: how proving what single-layer networks can't do led to everything they can

nutwani91on Richard Hamming: how one frustrated mathematician made data repair itself

When Bits Flip and Everything Breaks: Richard Hamming's Self-Correcting Code

nutwani91on Maurice Wilkes: changing hardware problems into software problems

Maurice Wilkes won the Turing Award in 1967. The citation focused on EDSAC, the first stored-program computer he built in 1949. And he invented Microprogamming, that changed hardware problems into software problems

nutwani91on The First Compiler: How Alan Jay Perlis Made Programming Human

Starting a series on Turing Award winners and other CS papers I find interesting. Week 01 is Alan Jay Perlis.

nutwani91on Ask HN: What's the one thing that let you grow the most as a developer?

But at the same time, wouldn't issues on Friday evenings have least impact on customers? Thinking around B2B enterprise companies.