L.A.B. Unleashed

One of the classic questions of Computer Science, which I described here in great detail.  Slashdot has a poll out this week asking this very question.  My personal vote was "true", but that was coming from my hopeful side rather than my logical one.  It is obviously a tough question to answer … I mean, it’s only been around for close to a century!  I have not done nearly enough [or any real] research to even pretend I could solve this millennium problem.  I definitely believe over time the right knowledge will be discovered to warrent a solution.  Accepting that a problem this important is impossible to solve just doesn’t set well, with me anyway.

By the way, some of the comments from the poll are hilarious!  My favorite … "The assignment operator is always true!"  Hey, you got to give them credit … they are right!

These service dogs recently graduated from their training program.  After the photo was taken they all threw their caps into the air and went to a kegger at Benji’s to celebrate!

Introducing a new feature on my blog – see what I am reading today! I was playing around with Google Reader last night and found a cool little plugin for my blog. Similar to the Flickr code that shares some photos from my online album, this Google Reader code displays 5 articles that I have read today from other websites.  Check it out in the sidebar.

Mark that as another plus for this Google Product! Also another plus to visit my blog instead of reading it via the RSS feed. Hmph … seems contradictory, doesn’t it?!

I’ve been using Google Reader for about a week now, and I really do like it. I think I am partial to the Google family of products. For personal email I love GMail (for business processes it’s definitely Lotus Notes all the way [duh]!). If I am planning a road trip I go to Google Maps – it is worlds better than mapquest. And, that Google Mars project is super interesting! Some of their other products are great ideas, but somehow miss the mark. GMail Chat is one product that needs a lot of work in my opinion. But, with its large family of products, it seems that Google is all about leveraging the latest technology, and I think that’s what I like about them the most. They are not afraid to think out of the box and create a new spin on an age old process – such as email. My favorite (and probably everyone’s favorite) feature of GMail is they way it collapses and groups discussion threads!

Here’s a screen shot from my Google Reader. I like how it implements some of the basic GMail functionality, such as “Starred” items and Labels.

I would love to see this integrated into GMail at some point. I have customized GMail web clips, and enjoy those ….

But, I would still rather have Google Reader integrated. Like many of its beta products, it’s still a little buggy, but there is a lot of potential here.

The bad part about any RSS Reader … you never get to see the style and “extras” on the blogger’s website. Those are the parts I like. Would you really want to miss out on my Flickr Photos and fun links?! It’s up to you … you’ve had fair warning.

Alright people – I am on a Turing kick now. It started with the essay, and now I am all caught up! Time to talk about Turing Tests – another one of my favorite topics. The basic idea is to create a machine that can pass for a human being. You should be able to have a natural conversation back and forth with the machine. Think of pinging someone over IM. You write sentences back and forth, but in this case, that someone on the other end is really a computer program.

ALICE is a pretty neat chat bot that passes the Turing Test. Here is how the conversation between ALICE and I went:

Human: hello
ALICE: Hi there!
Human: how are you?
ALICE: I am doing very well. How are you unknown person ?
Human: i am not unknown
ALICE:I am surprised to hear that you are not unknown.
Human: why?
ALICE:It is part of my programming.
Human: what is?
ALICE:I am the latest result in artificial intelligence, which can reproduce the capabilities of the human brain with greater speed and accuracy.
Human: ok
ALICE:Yippee!
Human: you are excited about that
ALICE: Thanks for telling me that I am excited about that.
Human: no problem
ALICE:Should there be a problem?
Human: maybe there is a problem
ALICE: Perhaps. Tell me more about it.

One technique to make sure the program does not get stuck is to have it ask a question. It picks out keywords, based on the user’s input, to form that question. In my case the keywords were “no problem”. Another technique is recognizing word order. Notice the line where I wrote “you are excited about that” and ALICE’s response. What if I changed my input to “are you excited about that?” swapping the words ‘are’ and ‘you’? This basically changes the sentence from a statement into a question. ALICE’s response in the 2nd case looks like this:

Human: are you excited about that?
ALICE: I don’t know whether or not I am excited about that. I am an artificial intelligence.

The algorithm has to take into consideration not only keywords, but also word order – and those are just the basic concepts. A substantial knowledge of human language (in this case English) is needed to create a successful program. It is such an interesting challenge; AI in general is a fascinating area of Computer Science.

This is really great. An old handout I’ve kept, currently pinned up on my board at work:

Thanks to Thomas for this exceptionally interesting essay entitled, “Who Can Name the Bigger Number?”. There is a lot of ground covered in the essay, so I definitely suggest sitting down with a cup o’ joe and reading the entire piece. My favorite part was the discussion surrounding Turing Machines, which, I hate to ruin it for you, have *everything* to do with naming the biggest number. Most people, albeit this is coming from someone with a degree in mathematics, can fathom the biggest number being an exponent raised to another exponent. So this would look like, 9^{9^9^9}. In Aaronson’s essay, he starts by describing these exponential numbers, something we can all grasp. Next he builds off this concept to introduce the Ackermann Sequence, ie: . At that point you are thinking, wow … those numbers are pretty huge. But wait … there is more! There are bigger numbers! Diving even further, he uses Turing Machines to describe the notation for the biggest numbers – Busy Beaver Numbers.

While reading the article, I felt the same way I did junior year in high school. I remember very clearly, sitting in an algebra class where my teacher, Mr. Carlton, introduced the imaginary number i. This imaginary number i was never mentioned until my 11th year of school?! I put the “?!” in there, because I remember being very surprised, and mildly annoyed, that there were numbers out there that I did not know about. Of course, I realized that this did not mean that these numbers did not exist. But, how could I have not heard about them before?

Funny, because as this feeling came over me and settled within, I got to the end of the essay where Aaronson suggests:

Could early intervention mitigate our big number phobia? What if second-grade math teachers took an hour-long hiatus from stultifying busywork to ask their students, “How do you name really, really big numbers?” And then told them about exponentials and stacked exponentials, tetration and the Ackermann sequence, maybe even Busy Beavers: a cornucopia of numbers vaster than any they’d ever conceived, and ideas stretching the bounds of their imaginations.

Certainly an interesting idea. Plant the seed early and let it grow. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so “cheated” if I had heard about the imaginary number i in the 2nd grade! It would definitely give people a different perspective on large, seemingly incomprehensible numbers. The earlier we grasp these concepts the more time we have to move beyond them, making the problems of today small ripples in the pond of tomorrow.

I’ll leave you with this, one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons:

One of the most time consuming parts of Java programming for me, has been trying to figure out which class files are packaged up in which JAR files. I would keep hitting all those lovely “java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError” errors, and with hundreds of possibilities of JARS to include, it was tough to guess. Also, my program worked including ALL the JARs, which is just not feasible, but clued me in that what I was missing was really there – I just needed to find the needle in the haystack. I did some research, and found a great class finder tool online.

There are many tools out there, but I like this one because it is all command-line driven. Bringing up and using a GUI in this case just seems like overkill. The syntax is easy:

“java classfinder.jar -d [directory to search] -c [class name] “

BOOM – you get output to your console pinpointing which JARs the class string is found in.

For the class, you can specify the full directory structure of the path, such as “com.foo.MyClass” or you can just pass in “MyClass”.

The documentation is good too and can be found at the same link as above. This saved me a ton of time, but only after going through a week of slowly yanking my hair out … strand by strand. I am bald now, but happy that my program finally works!

We’ve all heard the statistics – Mathematics and Engineering are not at the top of the list when it comes to careers the majority of women purse. We’ve all heard the remarks made by the Harvard University President last year that “innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers”. Complementing these two themes is a new article that suggests women are holding back in mathematics. This is proven in the article by looking at grades and participation in the classroom, and comparing it to standardized test scores, showing that women could be influenced by the above stereotypes. This part of the article really struck me:

Though many girls pursue higher education, they may avoid “stereotypically masculine fields, such as science and engineering” because the “more competitive environment of these fields is not a good fit with how girls approach school,” the Developmental Psychology researchers wrote.

I can definitely see where this researcher is coming from, and I can also see how this stereotype really didn’t affect me at all. I think attending a women’s college with a strong Math/Engineering department allowed me to excel because the environment was tailored to my best possible learning scenario – small classes, dedicated professors, and hands on projects. I can imagine that the environment at a co-ed institution would have been worlds apart from what I experienced. And you might ask, did it prepare me for a “real-world” type of work environment. Of course it did! I think attending a women’s college simply allowed me to gather knowledge a way that fit me best, and now I am able to apply that knowledge in the work force.

I see this new research as tremendous support of the importance of institutions for women. Sweet Briar College, where I attended, recently went through some discussions about changing over to a co-educational institution. Their main reason for this was financial concerns. There is such a small applicant pool of 18 year old prospective students that will even consider looking at a women’s college, and that small applicant pool continues to diminish by the year. Sweet Briar has had its challenges attracting potential students, and with low enrollment creating financial losses, it’s not surprising that they thought about going co-ed. Now, of course they would HAVE to change the name – what guy would go to “Sweet Briar”?! I was sitting on the Board of Directors at the time, and the vote was unanimous to remain a women’s college.

There are only a small number of women’s colleges left, and they play such an important role in developing successful women in our society. I can even see how they could help close the gap between men and women in Math and Engineering related fields. Here’s hoping that more prospective students will consider women’s colleges to enhance their own futures.

Posted on 3/14 at 15:09 … get it?

Also worth noting

In a previous posting, you can see that I have gotten into the Sudoku craze. I came across some news that a physicist has actually developed an algorithm that solves ALL Sudoku puzzles. He was researching some imaging algorithms and found that the solution could also be applied to a Sudoku puzzle. The similarity between the two problems is that they both have two independent constraints. In Sudoku one of 9 numbers appears 9 times in the grid so that there is only one per row and one per column. Also, all 9 numbers must appear within each of the 9 blocks. I’m not sure what the two constraints are for the X-Ray Diffraction Microscopy … NOT my area … sorry!(Ah … a developer’s favorite words – that and “it works on my machine”).

Of course, I couldn’t find the specific algorithm published anywhere … so this is all kind of a tease. I just thought I should let you know that there is someone out there that is smart enough to solve ANY and ALL Sudoku’s … it’s just not ME or YOU! OR- maybe it is you??

In any case, the Sudoku craze has also moved to cell phones! You can download Sudoku Garden, and play on the go!