Irreal

Apropos of nothing, here’s a really nice short video by Professor David Brailsford of The University of Nottingham about the days when Algol 68 and Pascal were in contention for the language to be taught in various computer courses. Some of those courses were for hardcore Computer Science students and others were for people in other disciplines who needed some computer and programming knowledge.

It’s hard to appreciate from today’s world of multiple industrial strength compilers for every language imaginable but in those days the decisions tended to be made on pragmatic grounds. In particular, Brailsford and his colleagues were concerned that whatever language they chose it should have a competent compiler with good diagnostics. Because this was all taking place in Nottingham in the UK, the situation was further complicated by the type of hardware that was available due to budget concerns.

In the end, they chose Algol 68 for the Computer Science students and Pascal for the others. Neither language has much of a mindshare today. The story that Brailsford tells takes place in the late sixties to the early seventies so Unix and C were on the horizon and would soon be recognized as the proper solution.

The video is only 10 minutes, 12 seconds long so it should be easy to find time for it. You won’t learn anything actionable from it but it’s a really interesting peek back to the early days that only a few still have first hand memory of. Those memories should not be lost so I urge you to take a look.

If you’re like me, you probably think that medical science has long since identified all the organs in the human body. Indeed, no new human organs have been identified for about 300 years. Until now.

The New York Times is reporting that researchers from the Netherlands have discovered a fourth set of pituitary glands at the junction of the nasal cavity and throat. It seems nearly impossible that they could have been missed for so long but they are in an out of the way place and require particularly sensitive imaging to detect. Also the researchers, who are oncologists, have examined only a small set of people who are cancer sufferers and they want a larger and more diverse sample.

Still, the preliminary data is pretty persuasive that they have in fact found a hitherto unknown organ. It’s a good lesson: no matter how settled we think a field may be there’s always something new to learn.

Everyone who’s been around for a while recognizes that computing has gotten more powerful. Problems that were once intractable now seem almost trivial. It’s not really surprising; it’s progress. It’s what we expect. But it does suggest the question: is the progress because of advancements in hardware or because of improved algorithms being brought to bear on the problems.

It turns out that some researchers have looked at the question scientifically and written up their results. Even better, Vivek Haldar discusses the paper in one of his “Read A Paper” videos. Johannes Fichte, Markus Hecher, and Stefan Szeider have a paper that Haldar discusses that studies the problem of SAT solvers. SAT solving is a notoriously hard NP-Complete problem but we’re now routinely solving problems that were impossible 20 years ago. Is that because the hardware is so much better or is it because the algorithms are so much improved?

To answer that question, the authors ran today’s algorithms on 20 year old hardware and algorithms from twenty years ago on today’s hardware. It’s a clever experiment. If you don’t already know the answer, take a second to guess what the answer is before you watch Haldar’s video or read the paper. If you need a hint, the answer is just what you’d expect it would be.