31–40 of 114 posts
I wonder how someone could make such a list and completely ignore cryptography. No, it is not enough to mention NP-completeness.
Is there a particular paper to point to?
And this seems to be a cool course: https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/34992/assignments/syllabu... > This course examines papers every computer scientist should have read, from the 1930s to the present. It is meant to be a synthesizing experience for advanced students in computer science: a way for them to see the field as a whole, not through a survey, but by reliving the experience of its creation. The idea is to create a unified view of the field of computer science, for students who already know something about it, by replaying its entire evolution at an accelerated frame rate.
> He sketches out a hypothetical “Turing Machine,” proving that, if something is computable at all, a machine (in principle) can handle it. That's not what Turing proved. Instead, what he proved in his paper was that there are some problems which aren't solvable by Turing Machines (and therefore presumably by any machine). That's the Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) referenced in the title. What TFA references…
Great list of papers. I've read five of of the seven papers on the list. The two I haven't read are Cerf and Kahn's, and Berner-Lee's. Turing's paper on computability was particularly hard to follow, for me, because he used these gothic-font upper-chase characters to name all sorts of objects, and all those characters looked kinda the same to me! I had to use auxiliary materials to be able to make my way through the…
Love this, agree w/ all. Probably just needs to be a bigger list. Unix paper. Hinton on deep learning (pick one). Map Reduce + GFS from Google. Paxos from dist systems. PGP paper; RSA paper
Andrew Tridgell and Paul Mackerras, The rsync algorithm, June 1996, https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-749/READINGS/required/c...
Love this, agree w/ all. Probably just needs to be a bigger list. Unix paper. Hinton on deep learning (pick one). Map Reduce + GFS from Google. Paxos from dist systems. PGP paper; RSA paper
Does anyone actually use Paxos in real life? And let me ask the same question for all other academic distributed algorithms right away. I recall seeing a study some 10 years ago checking the major cloud providers for Byzantine fault tolerance and finding none of them to exhibit the qualities that the known algorithms would guarantee; apparently they would just rely on timing and hoping things don't get too twisted.
The paper itself is very approachable and worth spending an hour or so on.
I actually found this to be an odd mix. Are we selecting papers that had an influence on computer science (as in, the theory of computation), or that had an impact on technology? Or are we just using CS as a catch-all for "all things computer"? The Turing paper is foundational for CS, but without it, would the technology have evolved differently? Probably not. Most software engineers have not read it. Conversely, the…