Computer Science

The problem of the Hanoi Tower is a classic exercise in recursive programming: the solution has a simple recursive definition, and its complexity and the matching lower bound are the solution of a simple recursive function (the solution is so easy that most students memorize it and regurgitate it at exams without truly understanding it). We describe how some very minor changes in the rules of the Hanoi Tower yield various increases of complexity in the solution, so that they require a deeper analysis than the classical Hanoi Tower problem while still yielding exponential solutions. In particular, we analyze the problem fo the Bouncing Tower, where just changing the insertion and extraction position from the top to the middle of the tower results in a surprising increase of complexity in the solution: such a tower of n disks can be optimally moved in 3 – √ n moves for n even (i.e. less than a Hanoi Tower of same height), via 5 recursive functions (or, equivalently, one recursion function with 5 states).

The history of computing in Mexico can not be thought without the name of Prof. Harold V. McIntosh (1929-2015). For almost 50 years, in Mexico he contributed to the development of computer science with wide international recognition. Approximately in 1964, McIntosh began working in the Physics Department of the Advanced Studies Center (CIEA) of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), now called CINVESTAV. In 1965, at the National Center of Calculus (CeNaC), he was a founding member of the Master in Computing, first in Latin America. With the support of Mario Baez Camargo and Enrique Melrose, McIntosh continues his research of Martin-Baltimore Computer Center and University of Florida at IBM 709.

Over the last two decades, the majority of German universities adopted various characteristics of the prevailing North-American academic system, resulting in significant changes in several key areas that include, e.g., both teaching and research. The universities' internal organizational structures, however, still follow a traditional, decentralized scheme implementing an additional organizational level -- the Chair -- effectively a "mini department" with dedicated staff, budget and infrastructure. Although the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has been establishing a more centralized scheme for many administrative tasks over the past decade, the transition from its distributed to a centralized information technology (IT) administration and infrastructure is still an ongoing process. In case of the authors' chair, this migration so far included handing over all network-related operations to the joint compute center, consolidating the Chair's legacy server system in terms of both hardware architectures and operating systems and, lately, moving selected services to replacements operated by Department or University. With requirements, individuals and organizations constantly shifting, this process, however, is neither close to completion nor particularly unique to TUM. In this paper, we will thus share our experiences w.r.t. this IT migration as we believe both that many of the other German universities might be facing similar challenges and that, in the future, North-American universities - currently not implementing the chair layer and instead relying on a centralized IT infrastructure - could need a more decentralized solution. Hoping that both benefit from this journey, we thus present the design, commissioning and evolution of our infrastructure.

In this work we firstly review some results in Classical Information Theory. Next, we try to generalize these results by using the Tsallis entropy. We present a preliminary result and discuss our aims in this field.

This text presents the research field of natural/unconventional computing as it appears in the book COMPUTING NATURE. The articles discussed consist a selection of works from the Symposium on Natural Computing at AISB-IACAP (British Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour and The International Association for Computing and Philosophy) World Congress 2012, held at the University of Birmingham, celebrating Turing centenary. The COMPUTING NATURE is about nature considered as the totality of physical existence, the universe. By physical we mean all phenomena, objects and processes, that are possible to detect either directly by our senses or via instruments. Historically, there have been many ways of describing the universe (cosmic egg, cosmic tree, theistic universe, mechanistic universe) while a particularly prominent contemporary approach is computational universe, as discussed in this article.

The Eureka-147 Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) standard defines the 'dynamic labels' data field for holding information about the transmission content. However, this information does not follow a well-defined structure since it is designed to carry text for direct output to displays, for human interpretation. This poses a problem when machine interpretation of DAB content information is desired. Extensible Markup Language (XML) was developed to allow for the well-defined, structured machine-to-machine exchange of data over computer networks. This article proposes a novel technique of machine-interpretable DAB content annotation and receiver hardware control, involving the utilisation of XML as metadata in the transmitted DAB frames.

This Master of Science in Computer and Information Sciences (MICS) is an international accredited master program that has been initiated in 2004 and started in September 2005. MICS is a research-oriented academic study of 4 semesters and a continuation of the Bachelor towards the PhD. It is completely taught in English, supported by lecturers coming from more than ten different countries. This report compass a description of its underlying architecture, describes some implementation details and gives a presentation of diverse experiences and results. As the program has been designed and implemented right after the creation of the University, the significance of the program is moreover a self-discovery of the computer science department, which has finally led to the creation of the today's research institutes and research axes.

In 1632, Galileo Galilei wrote a book called \textit{Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems} which compared the new Copernican model of the universe with the old Ptolemaic model. His book took the form of a dialogue between three philosophers, Salviati, a proponent of the Copernican model, Simplicio, a proponent of the Ptolemaic model, and Sagredo, who was initially open-minded and neutral. In this paper, I am going to use Galileo's idea to present a dialogue between three modern philosophers, Mr. Spock, a proponent of the view that P≠NP , Professor Simpson, a proponent of the view that P=NP , and Judge Wapner, who is initially open-minded and neutral.

ENUM marks either the convergence or collision of the public telephone network with the Internet. ENUM is an innovation in the domain name system (DNS). It starts with numerical domain names that are used to query DNS name servers. The servers respond with address information found in DNS records. This can be telephone numbers, email addresses, fax numbers, SIP addresses, or other information. The concept is to use a single number in order to obtain a plethora of contact information. By convention, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ENUM Working Group determined that an ENUM number would be the same numerical string as a telephone number. In addition, the assignee of an ENUM number would be the assignee of that telephone number. But ENUM could work with any numerical string or, in fact, any domain name. The IETF is already working on using E.212 numbers with ENUM. [Abridged]

This a biographical essay about Edsger Wybe Dijkstra.