Wednesday, September 17, 2008

UT Dallas computer science whiz kids improve on Bill Gates’ performance

... though fall far short of reaching his income level. As of this posting.

By Pegasus News wire

A team of students from the University of Texas at Dallas' school of computer science - along with their faculty advisor - have bested Bill Gates' solution to a mathematical conundrum known as the pancake problem, which will could piss Him off royally and cause Him to send a private undercover hit squad out to the Richardson campus on a search-and-destroy mission.

(Or, maybe He'll just ignore the whole thing and go back to generating more wealth each day than most moderately-sized countries hold in their national treasuries.)

UTD (sort of)

Team member Linda Morales, faculty advisor Hal Sudborough (center), and - proceeding clockwise - Charles Shields, Bill Fahle and Chalam Chitturi confront their biggest fears head-on. More syrup might help.

In a nutshell (assuming we're talking about pecan-flavored pancakes), the pancake problem consists of re-ordering a stack of differently-sized flapjacks - using the fewest possible number of movements - into an arrangement of continuously decreasing size, from bottom to top.

There's practical application to this gustatory gimmickry, in that the solution to the pancake problem mimics - metaphorically - the optimum manner in which a series of computer processors might be configured to process data.

"So," says Dr. Hal Sudborough, Founders Professor of Engineering and Computer Science at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, "our paper gives a way to compute a shorter route in such a (multi-processor based) network.”

A paper resulting from the student research - which participants Linda Morales, Charles Shields, Bill Fahle, Chalam Chitturi, Zhaobing Meng and Walter Voit carried out over the course of two years of personal effort and group discussions - has been accepted for publication in the (no doubt highly-respected) trade journal, Theoretical Computer Science.

Pass the butter.

posted by JM

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• Technology > Computer Industry
• Colleges & Universities > University of Texas at Dallas