The Complexity Of Songs
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The Complexity Of Songs
"The Complexity of Songs" is a scholarly article by computer scientist Donald Knuth in 1977, as an in-joke about computational complexity theory. The article capitalizes on the tendency of popular songs to devolve from long and content-rich ballads to highly repetitive texts with little or no meaningful content.Steven Krantz (2005) "Mathematical Apocrypha Redux", , pp.2, 3. The article notes that a song of length ''N'' words may be produced remembering, e.g., only words ("space complexity" of the song). Article summary Knuth writes that "our ancient ancestors invented the concept of refrain" to reduce the space complexity of songs, which becomes crucial when a large number of songs is to be committed to one's memory. Knuth's Lemma 1 states that if ''N'' is the length of a song, then the refrain decreases the song complexity to ''cN'', where the factor ''c'' < 1. Reprinted in: Knuth further demonstrates a way of producing songs with
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Scholarly Article
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field. Most established academic disciplines have their own journals and other outlets for publication, although many academic journals are somewhat interdisciplinary, and publish work from several distinct fields or subfields. There is also a tendency for existing journals to divide into specialized sections as the field itself becomes more spec ...
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Recurrence Relation
In mathematics, a recurrence relation is an equation according to which the nth term of a sequence of numbers is equal to some combination of the previous terms. Often, only k previous terms of the sequence appear in the equation, for a parameter k that is independent of n; this number k is called the ''order'' of the relation. If the values of the first k numbers in the sequence have been given, the rest of the sequence can be calculated by repeatedly applying the equation. In ''linear recurrences'', the th term is equated to a linear function of the k previous terms. A famous example is the recurrence for the Fibonacci numbers, F_n=F_+F_ where the order k is two and the linear function merely adds the two previous terms. This example is a linear recurrence with constant coefficients, because the coefficients of the linear function (1 and 1) are constants that do not depend on n. For these recurrences, one can express the general term of the sequence as a closed-form expression o ...
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Computer Humor
Computer humour, also known as hacker humour, is humour on the subject of computers or their users. Examples Examples of computer humour include: *"Any key", taken to mean pressing the (non-existent) "Any" key rather than any key *April Fools' Day Request for Comments *Bastard Operator From Hell, a fictional rogue computer operator *Blinkenlights, a neologism for diagnostic lights *Bogosort, a portmanteau of the words bogus and sort *COMEFROM, an obscure programming language control flow structure, originally as a joke *"The Complexity of Songs", a journal article published by computer scientist Donald Knuth in 1977 as an in-joke about computational complexity theory *''The Computer Contradictionary'', a non-fiction book by Stan Kelly-Bootle that compiles a satirical list of definitions of computer industry terms *''The Daily WTF'', a humorous blog dedicated to "Curious Perversions in Information Technology" *''Dilbert'', an American comic strip *Easter egg (media), Easter egg, an ...
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In-jokes
An in-joke, also known as an inside joke or a private joke, is a joke whose humour is understandable only to members of an ingroup; that is, people who are ''in'' a particular social group, occupation, or other community of shared interest. It is, therefore, an esoteric joke, only humorous to those who are aware of the circumstances behind it. In-jokes may exist within a small social clique, such as a group of friends, or extend to an entire profession or other relatively large group. An example is: ::Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice? ::A: Zorn's lemon. Individuals not familiar with the mathematical result Zorn's lemma are unlikely to understand the joke. The joke is a pun on the name of this result. Ethnic or religious groups may also have in-jokes. Philosophy In-jokes are cryptic allusions to shared common ground that act as selective triggers; only those who share that common ground are able to respond appropriately. An in-joke can work to build comm ...
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Mathematics Of Music
Music theory analyzes the pitch, timing, and structure of music. It uses mathematics to study elements of music such as tempo, chord progression, form, and meter. The attempt to structure and communicate new ways of composing and hearing music has led to musical applications of set theory, abstract algebra and number theory. While music theory has no axiomatic foundation in modern mathematics, the basis of musical sound can be described mathematically (using acoustics) and exhibits "a remarkable array of number properties". History Though ancient Chinese, Indians, Egyptians and Mesopotamians are known to have studied the mathematical principles of sound, the Pythagoreans (in particular Philolaus and Archytas) of ancient Greece were the first researchers known to have investigated the expression of musical scales in terms of numerical ratios, particularly the ratios of small integers. Their central doctrine was that "all nature consists of harmony arising out of numbers". From ...
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Computational Complexity Theory
In theoretical computer science and mathematics, computational complexity theory focuses on classifying computational problems according to their resource usage, and relating these classes to each other. A computational problem is a task solved by a computer. A computation problem is solvable by mechanical application of mathematical steps, such as an algorithm. A problem is regarded as inherently difficult if its solution requires significant resources, whatever the algorithm used. The theory formalizes this intuition, by introducing mathematical models of computation to study these problems and quantifying their computational complexity, i.e., the amount of resources needed to solve them, such as time and storage. Other measures of complexity are also used, such as the amount of communication (used in communication complexity), the number of gates in a circuit (used in circuit complexity) and the number of processors (used in parallel computing). One of the roles of computationa ...
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Alan Sherman
Alan Theodore Sherman (born February 26, 1957) is a full professor of computer science at UMBC, director of the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance (CISA), and director of the UMBC Chess Program. Sherman is an editor for Cryptologia, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi. Biography Education Sherman earned a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Brown University in 1978, a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1981, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from MIT in 1987. Professor Sherman's research interests include security of voting systems, cryptology, information assurance, and discrete algorithms. Chess Sherman has been the faculty advisor of the UMBC Chess Club since 1991, after playing in a student vs. faculty matc He recruits chess players worldwide with academic scholarship UMBC has been ranked among the best college teams, winning the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship in 1996, 1998, ...
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Subexponential Time
In computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of computer time it takes to run an algorithm. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations performed by the algorithm, supposing that each elementary operation takes a fixed amount of time to perform. Thus, the amount of time taken and the number of elementary operations performed by the algorithm are taken to be related by a constant factor. Since an algorithm's running time may vary among different inputs of the same size, one commonly considers the Worst-case complexity, worst-case time complexity, which is the maximum amount of time required for inputs of a given size. Less common, and usually specified explicitly, is the average-case complexity, which is the average of the time taken on inputs of a given size (this makes sense because there are only a finite number of possible inputs of a given size). In both cases, the time complexity i ...
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TELNET
Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control information in an 8-bit byte oriented data connection over the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Telnet was developed in 1969 beginning with , extended in , and standardized as Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Internet Standard STD 8, one of the first Internet standards. The name stands for " teletype network". Historically, Telnet provided access to a command-line interface on a remote host. However, because of serious security concerns when using Telnet over an open network such as the Internet, its use for this purpose has waned significantly in favor of SSH. The term ''telnet'' is also used to refer to the software that implements the client part of the protocol. Telnet client applications are available for virtually all c ...
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Guy L
Guy or GUY may refer to: Personal names * Guy (given name) * Guy (surname) * That Guy (...), the New Zealand street performer Leigh Hart Places * Guy, Alberta, a Canadian hamlet * Guy, Arkansas, US, a city * Guy, Indiana, US, an unincorporated community * Guy, Kentucky, US, an unincorporated community * Guy, Texas, US, an unincorporated community * Guy Street, Montreal, Canada Art and entertainment Films * ''Guy'' (1997 film) (American, starring Vincent D'Onofrio) * ''Guy'' (2018 film) (French, starring Alex Lutz) * '' That Guy... Who Was in That Thing'' (2012), a documentary film * Free Guy (2021), an action comedy film Music * ''Guy'' (album), debut studio album of Guy (band) 1988 * Guy (band), an American R&B group * "G.U.Y.", a 2014 song by Lady Gaga from the album ''Artpop'' Transport * Guy (sailing), rope to control a spinnaker on a sailboat * Air Guyane Express, ICAO code GUY * Guy Motors, a former British bus and truck builder * ''Guy'' (ship, 1933), ...
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Indian Chief
A tribal chief or chieftain is the leader of a tribal society or chiefdom. Tribe The concept of tribe is a broadly applied concept, based on tribal concepts of societies of western Afroeurasia. Tribal societies are sometimes categorized as an intermediate stage between the band society of the Paleolithic stage and civilization with centralized, super-regional government based in cities. Anthropologist Elman Service distinguishes two stages of tribal societies: simple societies organized by limited instances of social rank and prestige, and more stratified society, stratified societies led by chieftains or tribal kings (chiefdom A chiefdom is a form of hierarchical political organization in non-industrial societies usually based on kinship, and in which formal leadership is monopolized by the legitimate senior members of select families or 'houses'. These elites form a ...s). Stratified tribal societies led by tribal kings are thought to have flourished from the Neolit ...
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Mediaeval Europe
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and transitioned into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. Population decline, counterurbanisation, the collapse of centralized authority, invasions, and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in late antiquity, continued into the Early Middle Ages. The large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—most recently part of the Eastern R ...
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