Note: This is a seeding question, so please feel free to be pedantic etc. I will be deleting this paragraph some time after accepting an answer.
I recently read that it is possible to have arrays which need not be initialized: i.e. it is possible to use them without having to spend any time tryi...
The Eagles are a rock supergroup from the 70s and 80s, responsible for such classics as Hotel California. They have two quite distinctive sounds, one where guitarist Joe Walsh is present (for example, in Life in the Fast Lane) and one where he is absent. The latter songs have a markedly more somb...
A typical generational garbage collector keeps recently allocated data in a separate memory region. In typical programs, a lot of data is short-lived, so collecting young garbage (a minor GC cycle) frequently and collecting old garbage infrequently is a good compromise between memory overhead and...
Hm. We do 4. almost never. 2. explicitly says "Avoid generically defining the concept behind a tag, unless it is highly specialized." -- in the context of CS, trees are a highly specialised concept.
Anyway, we are arguing too much about inconsequential things.
I would like for some voting to take place on tag wiki (excerpts). As it is, you can easily get edit wars
@Gilles You can always accept and improve afterwards. Too bad there is no improve button as for posts...
I've been approving or rejecting Tag Wiki Excerpt Edit Suggestions, but some of them are close and I'd like to just tweak them. We can improve regular edit suggestions, how about giving us an Improve button for Tag Wiki Edit Suggestions.
Note: If I click on the tag wiki excerpt link, then it ta...
If there's nothing to say about a tag, I prefer to leave the tag wiki empty
If anyone on the site seeing the tag knows what it means, the tag doesn't particularly need an excerpt. If there's no content in the tag wiki, leave the excerpt blank.
cf Jeff: "That’s why the first two pages of tags should have excellent tag wiki excerpts at a minimum. If they have great, complete tag wikis, that’s even better, but you have to crawl before you can walk. Focusing on the ~500 character excerpt is a simple way to get started" (in the article you linked)
@Gilles Sure, but I can comfortably write a dozen excerpts in half an hour, wiki's take much longer. So I think as long as many tags do not even have an excerpt, leaving wikis for later is better.
The tag scheduling currently has 4 questions, all of which are about schedulers in multitasking operating systems. While this is technically a special case of scheduling algorithms, topics in operating systems and optimization tend to be disjoint. Should we use the same tag for both, or do we wan...
@Raphael The plans are actually about the be discussed, now that we're approaching your second week of private beta.
but they don't have an ETA on when we will hear from them :-/
I can not really estimate how "good" our beta is as I do not have participated in any other.
I think we have had good questions, we certainly have experts in a variety of subfields and we have motivated people. Our only weak spot is that we have not yet been tried extensively by the practitioner onslaught.
Dito. Given the wind we had to sail against earlier that is not an unfounded fear, I am afraid. "Look, we told you, this is never gonna work!" But let us have trust.
I have more questions taken from exercises or exams, but there have been some complaints.
If I look at this comment from Shog9 (meta.cs.stackexchange.com/questions/78/…) then at least they are willing to be persuaded by reason - this gives me hope that even if the initial judgement is not the desired outcome, then at least we can express our position and maybe sway their opinion
Hmm, I think I may have an interesting question - I formulated and answered it myself a few years ago
It's about priority queues with constant-time deletion and log n insertion :)
There are a great many data structures that implement the priority-queue interface:
Insert: insert an element into the structure
Get-Min: return the smallest element in the structure
Extract-Min: remove the smallest element in the structure
These structures are also commonly known as (min)hea...
The main issue is knowing which index is next to be swapped, the rest is easy
@Raphael I just saw that @IvoFlipse has a question about k-way mergesort - considering that I spent 8 hours per evening over the past 4-5 days debugging and implementing k-way mergesort, I might be of assistance :)
I've heard of (structural) induction. It allows you to build up finite structures from smaller ones and gives you proof principles for reasoning about such structures. The idea is clear enough.
But what about coinduction? How does it work? How can one say anything conclusive about an infinite...
@Gilles As I understand the question, it does not ask about a proof technique.
Not sure wether my answer is fully (or even remotely) correct; my introduction in coinduction was sketchy and I have not gotten around to reading more on it.
Ok; I only know coinductive definitions; coinduction as proof technique is beyond me. As you typically want properties to hold at any point in a trace (e.g.), normal induction should cut it.
I learned the word "bisimilarity" only two weeks ago while attending a workshop. It means two systems can not be distinguished from the outside, i.e. their internal actions are hidden,right?
I love 494, btw. I envision a music player where "random" moves smoothly through the genres and does not jump from Amy McDonald to Kalmah to Corrs to Metallica...
sometimes you're interested in all possible traces. Sometimes only whether certain traces are possible. Sometimes you don't care about “internal” traces
@Raphael, @AlextenBrink, @Gilles: Looks like you guys are learning something coming up with answers to these questions, which is great. @AlextenBrink: mCRL2 is a really useful tool. I'm using on for a paper I'm currently working on. It should be more well-known. The GUI is horrible, but the tools are super-robust and efficient.
CLI tool chains can be easier to use, once you've worked out what the chain is. Certainly, if you've used the mCRL2 tool, you'd start to love the CLI approach ... if you write a script.
There are a great many data structures that implement the priority-queue interface:
Insert: insert an element into the structure
Get-Min: return the smallest element in the structure
Extract-Min: remove the smallest element in the structure
These structures are also commonly known as (min)hea...
