News


News Feeds Selected
  • Nick D'Aloisio, age 17, sells Summly app to Yahoo for a reported $30 million. He wants to attend Oxford and study philosophy. (March 2013)

  • 3-D printed car (March 2013)

  • John McCarthy, inventor of LISP and pioneer in AI research, dies at age 84. His home page at Stanford links to his thoughts on the sustainability of human progress. (October 2011)

  • Opera experiment reports anomoly in flight time of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso. “The potential impact on science is too large to draw immediate conclusions or attempt physics interpretations." (September 2011)

  • Quantum computing device hints at powerful future -- BBC (March 2011)

  • 10 billion bits of entanglement achieved in silicon, from PhysOrg.com (January 2011). Here is an illustration (image: Stephanie Simmons) of a phosphorus nuclear spin entangled with its bound electron spin. -- courtesy of Jeb.

  • Was Moore's Law Inevitable? -- The Technium (October 2010)

  • Experts weigh in on Mac vs. PC security -- from CNET (February 2010)

  • Stanford researchers create world's smallest writing, using bits 0.3 nanometers across (January 2009) --courtesy of Alex.

  • Scooping the Loop Snooper, Geoffrey K. Pullum (November 2008) --courtesy of Jeb.

  • Two new Mersenne primes discovered: 243,112,609 - 1 has 12,978,189 digits. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search site is sometimes down, but here is where to go: GIMPS. (September 2008) --courtesy of Peter Lai.

  • CS picnic photos. (May 2008)

  • Big Dog (March 2008). Robot by Boston Dynamics--courtesy of Fedor

  • Congratulations to Eric Stratmann, who not only was accepted into the Ph.D. program at Stanford, but also managed to have lunch with Donald Knuth during his visit there! (March 2008)

  • Semiconductor Industry switches to hafnium-based transistors (January 2008) article from Physics Today--courtesy of Eric Kramer.

  • Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, died 155 years ago. She was the world's first computer programmer. Charles Babbage called her "the enchantress of numbers". The language Ada is named for her. (Nov 2007)

  • Congratulations to our three (!) teams who performed very well at the ACM Programming Competition this year. Here are some pictures: (Oct 2007)

  • Jonathan Schaeffer's group at the University of Alberta announces that their program, Chinook, has computationally solved checkers. To play Chinook or see the proof go here. (July 2007)

  • MIT Demonstrates Wireless Power Transfer. (June 2007)

  • Group photo from the 2007 CS Picnic. (May 2007)

  • Congratulations to Eric Stratmann for his summer position with Microsoft, to Del Slane for his summer job in the High Performance Computing department at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and to Dan Mateas for his REU at Depauw University. (May 2007)

  • Congratulations to Andrey Falko, whose project on designing a web interface for collective distribution maintenance of Gentoo was accepted by Google Summer of Code. His proposal was based on the 4th chapter of his B.A. thesis. (Apr 2007)

  • John Backus dies. John Backus, the inventor of FORTRAN and Backus-Naur form (with Peter Naur), dies at age 82. He was one of the great pioneers of computer science. Here is his 1977 Turing lecture. (Mar 2007)

  • Conversation with Hennessy & Patterson (Feb 2007) ACM interview with the authors of Computer Organization and Design. -- courtesy of Ian.

  • Intel tests 80-core processor (Feb 2007) chip exceeds 1 terraflop drawing only 62 watts of power. -- courtesy of Del.

  • ACM Digital Library (Jan 2007) The Alumni Library has added on-campus access to the ACM Digital Library. This is a very exciting new resource which provides browsing, searching and full-text access to some of the most important research in Computer Science. It is available only from the Simon's Rock campus. The full Computer Science Resources page from the library is also worth perusing. -- thanks to Dana Cummings and the wonderful library staff (and to Eric).

  • For the second straight year, Simon's Rock places third in the Northeastern North America Regional Preliminary of the ACM programming contest, this time behind Harvard and University of Southern Connecticut. Congratulations to Eric Stratmann and Ian Peters! (Oct 2006)

  • Jawed Karim (Oct 2006) -- he just wants to be a professor.

  • New Mersenne prime: 232,582,657 - 1 is the largest prime yet. It was found by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search project (GIMPS) and has 9,808,358 digits -- (Sept 2006)

  • Intel and UCSB develop chip with embedded lasers (Sept 2006) -- Intel press release here -- courtesy of Del.

  • The remarkable story of Grigory Perelman and the Poincaré conjecture is told in Manifold Destiny, by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber (Aug 2006) -- courtesy of Larry Wallach.

    A brief description of the Poincaré conjecture can be found here; the Tom Lehrer song, "Lobachevsky", is here:

    -- download Flash --


  • IBM sets chip speed record (June 2006) -- germanium laced silicon reaches 350GHz.

  • Computer Science picnic photos (May 2006)

  • Boot Camp and Parallels (April 2006) -- Apple does Windows. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.)

  • iPod, Therefore I am (April 2006) -- ruminations on technology and culture as Apple turns 30.

  • IBM develops 29.9 nanometer lithography process (Feb 2006)

  • Llamas place third behind MIT and Harvard in ACM Northeastern Regional Preliminary and take fifth in the Northeastern Finals. (Oct 2005, Nov 2005) -- Congratulations to Fedor Labounko, Mike Haskel, and Eric Stratmann! -- news release and problem set (.pdf).

  • Planarity (Oct 2005)--planar graphs. One can also avoid studying with Sudoku.

  • CS Concentration (Aug 2005)--Simon's Rock approves new concentration in Computer Science.

  • Proof and Beauty (Apr 2005)--computers in mathematical proofs.

  • NPR Interview with Donald Knuth (Mar 2005)--'founding artist' of computer science--courtesy of Bill Dunbar.

  • The Crossbar Latch (Feb 2005)--HP develops replacement for the transistor--courtesy of Paulo.

  • Juggling Lab (Feb 2005 [2010])--applet artistry.

  • Living Robots (Jan 2005)--powered by muscle.

  • Quzzle (Dec 2004)--home page here--courtesy of Gabe.

  • Brain in a Dish (Oct 2004)--cultured rat brains learn to fly F-22 simulator.

  • Llamas at ACM Programming Contest (Oct 2004) -- Congratulations to Paulo Rodrigues, Fedor Labounko, and Adrian Cushman for excellent result at WNEC regional! Problem set is here. (.pdf)

  • 12th World Computer Chess Championships -- link broken, see here (July 2004)