Q1.
"Now, at last, I've been able to go through all the letters accumulated
during those 15 years, in order to correct all errors that were reported
to me. And on July 1 I sent out more than 250 letters, 125 of which
contain checks to reward the first finder of each error. I may not be
quick, but at least I keep my promises.."
This is a quote taken from someone's web page. Who on what?
Q2. First devised by Alonzo Church, first to provide a foundation for mathematics and then to show the existence of unsolvable problems. This lead to the development of the theory of computation. What?
Q3. Bell Telephone Labs joined a project with MIT and General Electric which it later dropped out of in April 1969. Two of its programmers continued working on a similar project on their own and even named it as a joke on their earlier project. They presented a paper on this work at the 1973 SIGOPS conference which won the best paper award that year. What was the project?
Q4. Her social life included Charles Dickens, Sir David Brewster(creator of the kaleidoscope), Charles Babbage, Charles Wheatstone and Michael Faraday. She wrote a plan regarding how the difference engine could be used to calculate Bernoulli numbers. This is largely considered the first program ever. Who was she?
Q5. This machine was conceived considering "states of the mind" that would be involved in a human beings mental process. Its inventor compared it to "the formula or the equation". There can be an infinite number of each, each corresponding to a definite set of steps leading to a solution. It was one machine for all possible tasks. What?
Q6. Herman Hollerith, won a contest by the US census Bureau to devise an efficent method of tabulating census data. Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Co. in 1896. This company merged with Computing Scale of America Co, and the International Time Recording Co in 1914 to form the "Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co" which sold computing devices and had offices in US and Canada. How was this company later renamed in 1924 as?
Q7. 30 June 1945: The "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" was written and set the stage for computer architectural design for many years. This work included the concept of a "stored program" and this architectural style was named after him. What is the architectural style?
Q8. Based on an implementation of a digital code interpreter for the IBM 701 named Speedcoding, John Backus proposed the development of a programming language that would allow uses to express their problems in commonly understood mathematical formulae. Assembling a team of researchers from IBM and other customer sites, Backus always believed that it would take them 6 months to complete the task. How do we know this language?
Q9. John McCarthy requested funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for a two-month, 10-person study conference that would explore the proposition that "intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." He coined a term to describe his research which stuck. What?
Q10. Edgser Dikjstra laid the foundation stone in the march towards creating structure in the domain of programming by writing, not a scholarly paper on the subject, but instead a letter to the editor entitled " <Dash> Statement Considered Harmful". (Comm. ACM, August 1968) Fill in the dash.
Q11. A student of University of North Carolina wrote scripts to allow for UUCP(Unix-Unix-Copy Protocol) communication with Duke University. The scripts allowed for retrieval of articles relevant to specific topics from the machines. This gave rise to a phenomenon we are all familiar with. Name it.
Q12. It started in 1967 with a Minsk II computer and a five member team. It diversified from supporting the computing needs of an academic community into education as well. In 1982, after a change of name, and with 22 people now involved, it became the largest of its kind in the country. How do we better know it?
Q13. The Dutch words Probonen and Verogen lend to the naming of a very important construct in computer engineering. What?
Q14. Hilbert posed the "Entscheidungsproblem". How do we better know it?
Q15. Euclid wrote a book called "Elements". It did not contain any new or original work, but was still a pioneer in some sense. Why did he name it thus?
Q16. The ancient Indians used the term "jiva" to refer to their measurement of angles and lengths contained in a half-chord of a circle. This was later translated into Arabic and mistranslated into a Latin word meaning a hollow or an inlet and gave its name to a function. How do we know this function?
Q17. Roberte Recorde in his book "The Whetstone of Whitte" in 1557 wrote "I will settle as I do often in work use, a pair of parallelles or Gemowe lines of one length, because no two things can be more equal." What is he talking about?
Q18. They were initially called "artificial numbers". Their present name comes from the Greek words for "ratio" and "number". Give me the word.
Q19.
1. Make up things about your opponent.
8. Tell them how smart you are.
10. Doubt their existence.
11. Lie, cheat, steal, leave the toilet seat up.
12. When in doubt: insult.
Here endeth the scripture.
What is being referred to?
A. The Flamers bible.
--------Visual Questions-----------------
V1.
This person used a steam engines to calculate navigation and other
tables. Later he applied to the British government and received what
might have been the first grant for CS research. Identify the two.
V2. This picture shows a report. What is its significance?
V3. This device revolutionised computers and took them beyond the vacuum tube phase. It was called the "transfer resistence" device. Identify.
V4. The work for a simulator for the AirForce led to the use of digital processing in a real-time system. The Whirlwind project conceived the technique of stringing memory cores onto a matrix of wires. What was developed?
V5. Identify this famous pair.
This is an excerpt from a speech:
"Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty. In the ten years that we
have worked together, I can recall only one case of miscoordination of
work. On that occasion, I discovered that we both had written the same
20-line assembly language program. I compared the sources and was
astounded to find that they matched character-for-character. The result
of our work together has been far greater than the work that we each
contributed.
I am a programmer. On my 1040 form, that is what I put down as my
occupation. As a programmer, I write programs."
This speech was delivered by someone referring to one of the people in the picture. They are known mostly for their involvement in a specific project. Who are the two in the picture?
---------Maths Puzzles------------------------------