The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.
Selected Papers on Computer Science (1996)
Donald Knuth
Obama authorized North Korea sanctions over cyber hacking. Solution there, it seems to me, is to create unhackable systems.
—
Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 03, 2015
Needless to say, this tweet prompted a number of subtle (and not so subtle) responses; it is just vague enough to not be 100% sure he is actually joking (because the software verification problem is trivial, right?).
Did North Korea hack Sony? I doubt it; perhaps it was from an unexpected agent.
N.B. high-profile cosmologists appear to be quite happy to make bold statements to the media on issues well outside of their expertise…
Having been shamed by Stephen Curry’s excellent posts on the books he has read the previous year for the second year on the bounce, I have decided to pick twelve books to read in 2015 that have been sitting unread in piles around my house.
Santa must have a way to hash humans. There's no way he's using names. There'd be too many collisions on the Naughty list.
—
InfoSec Taylor Swift (@SwiftOnSecurity) December 25, 2014While there are alternative explanations for how the naughty/nice list is generated, hashing is important: Santa could be using a Bloom filter, in which false positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not (i.e. a query returns either “possibly in set” or “definitely not in set”, thus it has a 100% recall rate).
And while we’re on this subject, remember Santa’s delivery route represents a nested Travelling Salesman Problem, compounded by the naughty/nice list changing every year…
(Merry Christmas…and watch out!)
The 6 12 many Rs of e-Research…what else could/should we add to this (especially in the context of research objects and supporting reproducible research)?
Kenji Takeda, Solutions Architect and Technical Manager with Microsoft Research, has written a blog post on Recomputability 2014, as well as discussing some of the issues (and potential opportunities) for reproducibility in computational science we have outlined in our joint paper (including a quote from me):
This is an exciting area of research and one that could have a profound impact on the way that computational science is performed. By rethinking how we develop, use, benchmark, and share algorithms, software, and models, alongside the development of integrated and automated e-infrastructure to support recomputability and reproducibility, we will be able to improve the efficiency of scientific exploration as well as promoting open and verifiable scientific research.
Read Kenji’s full post on the Microsoft Research Connections Blog.
No one knows how much software is used in research. Look around any lab and you’ll see software — both standard and bespoke — being used by all disciplines and seniorities of researchers. Software is clearly fundamental to research, but we can’t prove this without evidence. And this lack of evidence is the reason why we ran a survey of researchers at 15 Russell Group universities to find out about their software use and background.
The Software Sustainability Institute‘s recent survey of researchers at research-intensive UK universities is out. Headlines figures:
For the full story, see the SSI blog post; the survey results described there are based on the responses of 417 researchers selected at random from 15 Russell Group universities, with good representation from across the disciplines, genders and career grades. It represents a statistically significant number of responses that can be used to represent, at the very least, the views of people in research-intensive universities in the UK (the data collected from the survey is available for download and is licensed under a Creative Commons by Attribution licence).
(you may also like to sign this petition and join the UK Community of Research Software Engineers)
I am co-chairing Recomputability 2014 next week, an affiliated workshop of the 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2014). The final workshop programme is now available and it will take place on Thursday 11 December in the Hobart Room at the Hilton London Paddington hotel.
I will also be presenting our paper on sharing and publishing scientific models (arXiv), as well as chairing a panel session on the next steps for recomputability and reproducibility; I look forward to sharing some of the outcomes of this workshop over the next few weeks.
The workshop Twitter hashtag is #recomp14; you can also follow the workshop co-chairs: @DrTomCrick and @npch, as well as the main UCC account: @UCC2014_London.
(read the full NYT review here)
This week an image has been doing the rounds on Twitter, showing a letter to parents printed on the back of a pamphlet from a LEGO set:
Originally posted on reddit, it unsurprisingly went viral but with many questioning its authenticity. However, it has been confirmed as genuine by LEGO UK:
The text is from 1974 and was a part of a pamphlet showing a variety of Lego doll house products targeted girls aged 4 and up. It remains relevant to this day — our focus has always been, and remains to bring creative play experiences to all children in the world…ultimately enabling children to build and create whatever they can imagine.
Don’t forget, you can use this helpful guide to check to see if a toy is for boys or girls.
If you enjoy mathematics as well as the BBC quiz series Pointless, hosted by Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman, then you will most definitely enjoy the following blog post by Mathistopheles:
This article is based on a gloriously irrelevant mathematical sequence that is derived (rather appropriately) from the episodes of the television show Pointless. It is the sort of idea that has me scribbling calculations on the back of envelopes for hours on end, despite there being absolutely no hope of an outcome that could in any way justify this investment of effort. In this first part, I introduce the sequence and explain how it is related to some well-known mathematical objects called Markov chains. In the vain hope that I might convey my enthusiasm for this topic to others, I have tried to write this piece in a fairly accessible way. Almost no mathematical knowledge is assumed, beyond a rough idea of what probability is.
It provides a clear and accessible analysis of how the quiz show works by using directed graphs, matrices and Markov chains: read the full post here.
There is nothing to do with computers that merits a PhD.
Max Newman (1897-1984), as quoted in Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges
An integer is either a perfect square or its square root is irrational. Essentially: when you compute the square root of an integer, there are either no figures to the right of the decimal or there are an infinite number of figures to right of the decimal and they don’t repeat. There’s no middle ground — you can’t hope, for example, that the decimal expansion might stop or repeat after a hundred or so terms.
The proof of this theorem is surprisingly simple, not much harder than the familiar proof that the square root of 2 is irrational.
Suppose 
and so:
Now the right side of the equation above is an integer, so the left side must be an integer as well. But 
Another way to get the same result is to assume 
So what we said about square roots extends to cube roots and in fact to all integer roots (for example, the fifth root of an integer is either an integer or an irrational number). In other words: no (non-integer) fraction, when raised to a power, can produce an integer.
(reblogged from John D. Cook’s blog)
Man is a rational animal — so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.
Unpopular Essays (1950)
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Fancy doing a PhD with me at Cardiff Metropolitan University? I have a fully-funded studentship (for UK/EU students) starting in January, in collaboration with HP in Bristol:
The Department of Computing & Information Systems, Cardiff Metropolitan University, is pleased to offer a fully funded PhD Studentship in Provably Optimal Code Generation.
This research project (Scaling Superoptimisation for Enterprise Applications) is part of an on-going strategic collaboration between Cardiff Metropolitan University and Hewlett-Packard in Bristol; HP is a leading technology company that operates in more than 170 countries around the world, providing infrastructure and business offerings that span from handheld devices to some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Applicants must have an excellent first degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics or a related discipline, with interests/experience at the hardware/software interface and/or in mathematical foundations.
This three year PhD will commence in January 2015. The PhD bursary consists of the standard tuition fee for a Home/EU student (to be £3,760 in 2014/15) and a stipend linked to the minimum amount set annually by Research Councils UK (currently £13,590 p.a.).
Project Context:
Our world is increasingly dependent on the effectiveness and performance of software. Tools and methodologies for creating useful software artefacts have been around for many years, but the scalability of these systems for solving challenging real world problems are — in many important cases — poor. While there are numerous socio-technical issues associated with developing large software systems, there is a significant opportunity to address the optimisation of software in a strategic, adaptable and platform-independent way.
Superoptimisation is an approach to optimising code by aiming for optimality from the outset, rather than as the aggregation of heuristics that are neither intended nor guaranteed to give provable optimality. Building on previous work by Crick et al., this research project will further develop the theoretical foundations of superoptimisation, as well as developing a scalable toolchain for superoptimising enterprise-level software applications.
For informal enquiries, please send me an email: tcrick@cardiffmet.ac.uk (but please apply via FindAPhD or here).
Deadline for applications: Friday 31 October.
Last month, me, Ben Hall, Samin Ishtiaq and Kenji Takeda (all Microsoft Research) submitted a paper to Recomputability 2014, to be held in conjunction with the 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2014) in London in December. This workshop is an interdisciplinary forum for academic and industrial researchers, practitioners and developers to discuss challenges, ideas, policy and practical experience in reproducibility, recomputation, reusability and reliability across utility and cloud computing. It aims to provide an opportunity to share and showcase best practice, as well as to offering a platform to further develop policy, initiatives and practical techniques for researchers in this domain.
In our paper, we discuss a number of issues in this space, proposing a new open platform for the sharing and reuse of scientific models and benchmarks. You can download our arXiv pre-print; the abstract is as follows:
The reproduction and replication of reported scientific results is a hot topic within the academic community. The retraction of numerous studies from a wide range of disciplines, from climate science to bioscience, has drawn the focus of many commentators, but there exists a wider socio-cultural problem that pervades the scientific community. Sharing data and models often requires extra effort, and this is currently seen as a significant overhead that may not be worth the time investment.
Automated systems, which allow easy reproduction of results, offer the potential to incentivise a culture change and drive the adoption of new techniques to improve the efficiency of scientific exploration. In this paper, we discuss the value of improved access and sharing of the two key types of results arising from work done in the computational sciences: models and algorithms. We propose the development of an integrated cloud-based system underpinning computational science, linking together software and data repositories, toolchains, workflows and outputs, providing a seamless automated infrastructure for the verification and validation of scientific models and in particular, performance benchmarks.
(see GitHub repo)
