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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 [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |