Page 15 - Leonhard Euler News Today

Homo informaticus Luc de Brabandere lets us sail with him along the two great rivers of thought that have flowed down the centuries from ancient philosophy into modern computer science, from Plato and Aristotle to Alan Turing and Claude Shannon. The history of computer science did not begin eighty years ago with the creation of the first electronic computer. To program a computer to process information – or in other words, to simulate thought – we need to be able to understand, dismantle an...

everything we experience -- in nature as well as human activity -- involves a series of connections that link one thing to another. networks, you might say, make the world go round. [ indistinct chattering ] meet raymond price: media tycoon, power broker, and center of attention. this is his party, his network. enter joe smith. hes just crashed the social event of the year and apparently doesnt know a soul. but this is one network joe would like to join. now, if he could only get conne...

consider the universe of a video game. on the surface, it looks like a two-dimensional square section of the standard euclidean plane that we learned about in high school. but something interesting happens when our little ship jets away to avoid a collision. what just happened? did the ship leap into hyperspace? did it fall off the edge of its universe? are the programmers just messing with our perceptions, trying to make the game more difficult? or is there something else going on? we...