The first of this term's CSC social events, we will be going to see the movie ``Brainstorm'' at the Princess Cinema. This outing is intended primarily for the new first-year students.
The Princess Cinema is Waterloo's repertoire theatre. This month and next, they are featuring a ``Cyber Film Festival''. Upcoming films include:
Admission is $4.25 for a Princess member, $7.50 for a non-member. Membership to the Princess is $7.00 per year.
What is the next step in the evolution of computer languages? Intelligent agents? Distributed objects? or visual languages?
Visual languages overcome many of the drawbacks and limitations of the textual languages that software development is based on today. Do you think about programming in a linear fashion? Or do you draw a mental picture of your algorithm and then linearize it for the benefit of your compiler? Wouldn't it be nice if you could code the same way you think?
Visual C++ and Visual BASIC aren't visual languages, but Prograph is. Prograph is a commercially available, visual, object-oriented, data-flow language. It is well suited to graphical user interface development, but is as powerful for general-purpose programming as any textual language.
The talk will comprise a discussion of the problems of textual languages that visual languages solve, a live demonstration of Prograph, and some of my observations of the applications of Prograph to software development.
So you think you're a pretty good programmer? Pit your skills against others on campus in this triannual event! Contestants will have three hours to solve five programming problems in either C or Pascal.
Last fall's winners went on to the International Finals and came first overall! You could be there, too!
Did you know that your undergrad account at Waterloo gives you access tothe world's largest computer network? With thousands of discussion groups, gigabytes of files to download, multimedia information browsers, even on-line entertainment?
The resources available on the Internet are vast and wondrous, but the tools for navigating it are sometimes confusing and arcane. In this hands-on tutorial you will get the chance to get your feet wet with the world's most mind-bogglingly big computer network, the protocols and programs used, and how to use them responsibly and effectively.
This will be a descussion of the pitfalls of using mathematics and algorithms to play classical board games. Thorough descriptions shall be presented of the simple techniques used as the building blocks that make all modern computer game players. I will use tic-tac-toe as a control for my arguements. Other games such as Chess, Othello and Go shall be the be a greater measure of progress; and more importantly the targets of our dreams.
To enhance the discussion of the future, Barney Pell's Metagamer shall be introduced. His work in define classes of games is important in identifying the features necessary for analysis.
GNU Hurd is an operating system kernel based on the microkernel architecture design. It was the original GNU kernel, predating Linux, and is still being actively developed by many volunteers.
The Toronto-area Hurd Users Group, in co-operation with the Computer Science Club, is hosting an afternoon to show the Hurd to anyone interested. Jeff Bailey, a Hurd developer, will give a presentation on the Hurd, followed by a GnuPG/PGP keysigning party. To finish it off, James Morrison, also a Hurd developer, will be hosting a Debian GNU/Hurd installation session.
All interested are invited to attend. Bring your GnuPG/PGP fingerprint and mail your key to sjdutoit@uwaterloo.ca with the subject ``keysigning'' (see separate announcement).
Questions? Suggestions? Contact James Morrison.
GnuPG and PGP provide public-key based encryption for e-mail and other electronic communication. In addition to preventing others from reading your private e-mail, this allows you to verify that an e-mail or file was indeed written by its perceived author.
In order to make sure a GnuPG/PGP key belongs to the respective person, the key must be signed by someone who has checked the user's key fingerprint and verified the user's identification.
A keysigning party is an ideal occasion to have your key signed by many people, thus strengthening the authority of your key. Everyone showing up exchanges key signatures after verifying ID and fingerprints. The Computer Science Club will be hosting such a keysigning party together with the Hurd presentation by THUG (see separate announcement). See the keysigning party homepage for more information.
Before attending it is important that you mail your key to sjdutoit@uwaterloo.ca with the subject ``keysigning.'' Also make sure to bring photo ID and a copy of your GnuPG/PGP fingerprint on a sheet of paper to the event.
DVD copy protection: Content Scrambling System (CSS)
DVD-Video specifics: Menus and navigation
This is the second in a series of seminars that cover the use of the UNIX Operating System. UNIX is used in a variety of applications, both in academia and industry. We will provide you with hands-on experience with the Math Faculty's UNIX environment in this tutorial.
Topics that will be discussed include:
If you do not have a Math computer account, don't panic; one will be lent to you for the duration of this class.
The asian game go is unique in a number of ways. It is the oldest board game known. It is a strategy game with very simple rules. Computer programs are very weak despite huge efforts and prizes of US$ > 1.5M for a program beating professional players. The talk will quickly explain the rules of go, compare go and chess, mention various attempts to program go and describe our own efforts in this field. Students will have an opportunity to solve computer generated go problems. Prizes will be available.
Would you like to get involved in the CSC? Would you like to have a say in what the CSC does this term? Come out to the CSC Elections! In addition to electing the executive for the Winter term, we will be appointing office staff and other positions. Look for details in uw.csc.
Nominations for all positions are being taken in the CSC office, MC 3036.
They haven't been done in 2 terms. We have an old list of books to buy. Any suggestions from uw.csc are welcome.
For doing linux burns. It was allocated money on the budget request - about $300. We should be able to get a decent 12x burner with that (8x rewrite).
The obvious things to sell are Linux Distros and BSD variants. Are there any other software that we can legally burn and sell to students?
Just a talk of the topics to be covered, when, where, whatnot. Mike was right on this one, this should have been done earlier in the term. Oh well, maybe we can fix this for next fall term.
We already put a bit of work into planning the Othello contest before I read Mike's post. I still think it's viable. I've got at least 2 people interested in writing entries for it. This will be talked about more on monday. Hopefully, Rory and I will be able to present a basic outline of how the contest is going to be run at that time.
Current sysadmin (jmbeverl) and I (kvijayan) and President (geduggan) had a nice conversation about this 2 days ago, having to do with completely erasing all of peri, installing a clean stable potato debian on it, and priming it for being a gradual replacement to calum. We'll probably discuss how much we want to get done on this front on Monday.
Any comments from the newsgroup are welcome.
Our ACM-Style practice contests involve answering five questions in three hours. Solutions are written in Pascal, C or C++. Seven years in a row, Waterloo's teams have been in the top ten at the world finals. For more information, see the contest web page.
A palindrome is a sequence of letters that reads the same backwards and forwards, such as ``Madam, I'm Adam'' (note that case doesn't matter and only letters are important). Your task is to find the longest palindrome in a line of text (if there is a tie, print the leftmost one).
Input: Output: asfgjh12dsfgg kj0ab12321BA wdDwkj abBA abcbabCdcbaqwerewq abCdcba
An anagram is a word formed by reordering the letters of another word. Find all sets of anagrams that exist within a large dictionary. The input will be a sorted list of words (up to 4000 words), one per line. Output each set of anagrams on a separate line. Each set should be in alphabetical order, and all lines of sets should be in alphabetical order. A word with no anagrams is a set of anagrams itself, and should be displayed with no modifications.
Input: Output: post post pots stop pots start start stop