CS 190 Computer Science Design Project
A. Klinger Winter 1998 Boelter 5272
This section has as its main theme that working in information technology usually involves many people. The point is that instead of exercising one's special skills, significant accomplishment requires people to cooperate, synthesize their individual products to make up a joint effort, or, at minimum, convince another that something of substance has been done.
By week six a project team should have completed some work toward its ultimate goal. Since the project has been described (we'd hope that was done by third or fourth week), there is a draft of an abstract, summary. That kind of item is a short paragraph. Building of an overview of the project is the next job.
An outline is an overview document. It is analogous to a table of contents in a finished document (e.g., a report or book). One way to report about a project is to create a talk outline that goes over the entire effort.
Another overview approach expands the description and adds to it a
work plan. That approach is used in the
Pyramid project.
[Item I. there was edited by A. Klinger. Questions in parentheses there
are suggestions for improvement by B. Darrah, who is doing this as a
Master's Comprehensive project.]
Creativity takes many forms. The range is from
a novel concept to a complete invention described by a working prototype
that resolves a need. At origination, work could consist of a description
of new software, hardware, analysis, or system activity.
Cooperate
Communicate
Examples
Electronic Mail (Email)
Email led to a search engine result. Here is the complete exchange.
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 17:37:21 PST
To: Allen Klinger
cc: help@CS.UCLA.EDU, Leonard Kleinrock
From: Dat Quang Le
Subject: Re: Need title/date re K Olsen of Digital's remark.
Hi all, I found it:
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
-Ken Olsen, President of DEC, World Future Society Convention, 1977
I used Altavista search, and I found it at:
http://ftp.digital.com/pub/BSD/FreeBSD-current/src/games/fortune/datfiles/fortu
nes
Dat Q. Le
On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, Allen Klinger wrote:
> Can anyone supply his title and the year Olsen made this statement?
>
> There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
-Ken Olsen, Digital Equipment Corp.
Cooperation flowed out of the email communication; work is shown by the new result (title, year).
Tabulated Computations
(The following is to enable constructing better html, which will be done
over time.)
The following also involved email, and some computational work. The
entire task initiation (through creation of a first draft of the table)
took only hours although it required cooperation. Calculations on data
in email responses from a majority of the students completed within a
short time period from the initial inquiry form the basis of this work.
A partial summary was sent out "Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 22:38:30 PST" with the header "Subject: Results" and text excerpts:
As an experiment I tested the numbers provided by ... people
who've responded to my msgs today about birth-date/social-security-no.
Using Mathematica I determined the integer factorizations of those
numbers, and my own values, leading to items I've entered into a file that
represents my effort to "write it down" or "keep an engineering
notebook" record. Then I created the first draft of a table that
summarized the key data. Here's that table. ...
The email table draft covered much of the following (which has been
revised to include a new datum and clarification of title/headings):
Number of Factors
Case BD SSN
1........2..... 3
2........3..... 2
3........3..... 3
4........3..... 4 _____ [Key-
5........3..... 4 _____ birth-date: BD;
6........3..... 5 _____ social-security-no.: SSN]
7........2..... 5
8........4..... 2
9........3..... 4
10.......3..... 2
11.......4..... 5
12.......2..... 2
Table W.1. How Close To Prime Are Ordinary Numbers?
In a previous class students located the
Search In 10 Million Digits of Pi Page
by Jeremy Gilbert, grath@cs.brandeis.edu, 12/14/95.
It "provides a form to scan for an arbitrary decimal
pattern in the first 10 million digits of PI. The value of PI ... used
... found on http://www.hepl.phys.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~mitsuru/pi-e.html."
That utility was used to determine the following facts, comparing
factors to PI-location for some of the birth-dates used in the above
experiment (see Table W.2).
Where In Pi
BDFactors ............ 2 ................... 3 ............ 4 ............... 2 .......... 3 .......... 2
PiHits ...............>300................ 11.......... 109 .........>300 ......... 103 ........... 93
EarliestHit .....15277........164961........ 63115 .......20316 .......5658 .......207250
Found by http://gryphon.ccs.brandeis.edu/cgi-bin/gpi
Table W.2. Number of Factors, Earliest, and Total Hits in Pi
Approximating Pi
3.14 ... 3.14159 ... 22/7 = 3.142857 ... 355/113 = 3.14159292 ...
(2143/22)^(1/4) = 3.141592653 Sharp EL-520L Calculator with 10 decimal places
display. Stored as calculator value of Pi 3.141592654
Table W.3. Pi Values
Power Notation List Equivalent
Mathematica Input and Output .......... Comments
In[1]:= FactorInteger[102544] .......... Built in function.
Arguments in square brackets.
Out[1]= {{2, 4}, {13, 1}, {17, 1}, {29, 1}} .......... Factor list in {base, exponent} format.
In[2]:= 2^4 13 17 29 ........... Adjacent numbers multiply; a^b is a to the b power.
Out[2]= 102544 ............Multiplication result.
Figure W.1. Verifying Mathematica Syntax