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Skimming through the pages on the video, it shows vividly how far away academia is from real life problems.
Probably a true statement for every theoretical academic field. Yet, very mysteriously the obscure academic problems have produced our great wealth of technology. I find this fascinating.
Skimming through the pages on the video, it shows vividly how far away academia is from real life problems.
This bring back memories. I was preparing for GATE in 2006 after getting my bachelors. Actually started preparing from 2004. I was so bad at Automata Theory and discreet maths. I never got admitted to the prestigious IITs, but that preparation and learning was helpful later in my career when I got admitted to MS program in a US university.
Skimming through the pages on the video, it shows vividly how far away academia is from real life problems.
I guess this is a bit like the Someone Else's Problem phenomenon. Nobody needs to know about compilers, operating systems or analysis of algorithms because Somebody Else will deal with those things.
Not true, he skipped a few after giving up. Title should be, Professor TRIES to solve 240 computer science exam problems.
Anyone know if these questions are freely available?
Questions are categorized based on the subjects, I used this while preparing for GATE in 2015/2016.
Not true, he skipped a few after giving up. Title should be, Professor TRIES to solve 240 computer science exam problems.
I was fully expecting to see an implementation of a red-black tree, the use of software patterns, questions of why a certain solution was picked or what algorithm to pick and why, creating a circuit with logic gates that fulfill a certain function, etc.
This all seems more like a test of memory. "Do you remember exercise XXX on page YYY? Great, now pick the correct solution!". Him saying "I remember the solution to this from one of my earlier videos" even confirmed my bias against these things.
Skimming through the pages on the video, it shows vividly how far away academia is from real life problems.
I guess this is a bit like the Someone Else's Problem phenomenon. Nobody needs to know about compilers, operating systems or analysis of algorithms because Somebody Else will deal with those things.
I've followed a few courses on this, and they all focus on the mathematical background of it. Sure, it's neat to be able to prove some stuff about a toy language, but what does it really teach you?
"Regular expressions" in most programming languages are not regular. A lot of programming languages aren't even context-free. Heck, C++ templates are Turing complete! Does anyone care? Not really. It works, and unless you intentionally abuse it, it's not even that painful to use.
Meanwhile in academia, the parser is automatically generated from its EBNF definition using an algorithm proven to be optimal, but when you try to compile anything containing syntax errors it's either crash, infinite loop, or dump a completely gibberish error message.
I really get the feeling that a large part of academia is busy inventing their own problems to solve. From my experience, they are extremely bad at teaching how to solve real problems.
As a non-computer science person, I feel very dumb right now. :-(
As a guy who graduated in comp sci I feel even dumber right now. :( edit: cause I don't remember much of this stuff.
You use it so much that it is down to intuition, or you never use it at all.
For example, my relationship to Orders of Complexity has been reduced to sorting options in my head, and picking the first one that is simple enough to keep working, and fast enough to satisfy the current and estimated future scope of the problem (which is also intuitive Capacity Planning).
If you make me explain the decision it might sound like I picked one at random.