the arc of software bends towards understanding
For the final project in our theoretical computer science and philosophy class taught by Scott Aaronson, Karen Sittig and I decided to create an interactive demonstration of zero-knowledge proofs. (Sorry, the picture below is not clickable.) For the actually interactive demonstration, click here: http://web.mit.edu/~ezyang/Public/graph/svg.html (you will need a recent version of Firefox or Chrome, since […]
In his classic essay Reflections on Trusting Trust, Ken Thompson describes a self-replicating compiler bug which is undetectable by source code inspection. The self-replication is made possible by the fact that most compilers are self-compiling: old versions of a compiler are used to compile new ones, and if the old version is malicious, it can […]
What do automatic memory management, static types and purity have in common? They are methods which take advantage of the fact that we can make programs obviously correct (for some partial definition of correctness) upon visual inspection. Code using automatic memory management is obviously correct for a class of memory bugs. Code using static types […]
Being back in town over MIT's Infinite Activities Period is making me think about what kind of short lecture I want to try teaching. I've been turning over the idea of a polyglot programming class in my head: the idea is that while most people feel really comfortable with only one or two programming languages, […]
The opinions presented in this post are not necessarily mine. I'm just one very confused undergraduate senior with a lot of soul searching to do. When I tell my friends, “I’m going to get a PhD,” I sometimes get the response, “Good for you!” But other times, I get the response, “Why would you want […]
This is notebook two. Max Schäfer: Refactoring Java Most Java refactoring tools built into IDEs like Eclipse are little more than glorified text manipulation macros. There are no guarantees that the result of your refactoring will have the same behavior as the original: you can even refactor code that doesn’t even compile! To prevent this, […]
I recently attended a talk which discussed extending proof assistants with diagrammatic reasoning support , helping to break the hegemony of symbolic systems that is predominant in this field. While the work is certainly novel in some respects, I can't also but help think that we've come back full circle to the Ancient Greeks, who […]
Books are expensive, but by the power of higher-education (also expensive, but differently so), vast oceans of books are available to an enterprising compsci. Here’s my reading list for the spring break lending period (many of which were recommended on #haskell: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi. […]
I was flipping through An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic by Graham Priest and the section on many-valued logics caught my eye. Many-valued logics are logics with more than the usual two truth values true and false. The (strong) Kleene 3-valued logic, sets up the following truth table with 0, 1 and x (which is thought […]
This is a collection of WTFs due to misuse of mutable state. We'll start off with some Java. What do you expect this snippet of code to do? Sensor Accel = sm.getDefaultSensor(Sensor.TYPE_ACCELEROMETER); Sensor Orient = sm.getDefaultSensor(Sensor.TYPE_ORIENTATION); sm.registerListener((SensorEventListener) this, Accel, sm.SENSOR_DELAY_FASTEST); Ostensibly, it registers the current object to receive just accelerometer updates. But what if I […]