Pizza Party And More
04/08/2009
The Computer Science Department held a pizza party recently for its students to celebrate reaching the mid-term point. it was so successful we did it again a few weeks later. The first party saw us going through 7 pies and we made it to 10 for the second party. Would that some day we could need 20!
At the first party the following programming problem (a modified version of the Google Code Challenge) was posed
A Pizza of radius r is made with tomato sauce and cheese. The cheese laid down in long strips of width g. The crust of the pizza pie has width t.
A fly, in fact a blue-fly, lands randomly on the pie. The fly is represented as a circle of
diameter f. What is the probability that the fly will land 100% on tomato sauce with no
part of the fly touching either cheese or crust?
The cheese strips are perpendicular to one another and the two middle strips cross at
the center of the pie. The distance between any two parallel cheese strips is also g.
Write the program to solve the problem in a language you have not used before.
We had a good turn out for the first party but so far the only program subbmission came from someone not at the party.
The second party, held two weeks later, also had a programming challenge. This time the students were asked to explain the following one-line C program. It comes from the International Obfuscated C Code Contest
Obfuscate: tr.v. -cated, -cating, -cates. 1. a. To render obscure.
b. To darken. 2. To confuse: his emotions obfuscated his judgment.
[LLat. obfuscare, to darken : ob(intensive) + Lat. fuscare,
to darken < fuscus, dark.] -obfuscation n. obfuscatory adj
main(int c,char**v){return!m(v[1],v[2]);}m(char*s,char*t){return*t-42?*s?63==*t|*s==*t&&m(s+1,t+1):!*t:m(s,t+1)||*s&&m(s+1,t);}
While catching a quick lunch three students managed to figure the program out and got themselves a free book as a prize.
Computer Science Open House - April 4th
Call (845) 257 3556 to reserve your place today!
03/30/2009
This coming Saturday, April 4, we are holding Open House for accepted students. There will be a general meeting for accepted science students in the Coykendall Science Auditorium, at 12:15PM. At 1:15PM, in Room 21 of the same building students interested in Computer Science will meet with faculty and students of the department and be given an introduction to the program.
1:15 Welcome/Opening Remarks by Professor Pletch
1:20 CS Program & Job Perspectives by Professor Hanh Pham
1:30 Automatic Email Classification by student, James Davila and Andrew Kovak
1:40 Professor Easwaran's students Google Project
1:50 Professor Pletch's talks about Prolog & Robot demo
2:00 Professor Pletch's student Robot class demos
2:10 QA/Chat session
2:30 Tour to CS facilities by Professor Hanh Pham
Finally, our department was honored this year to have one of its faculty named a University Distinguished Research Professor – Professor Keqin Li. Below is a photo of Professor Li at a recent pizza party honoring computer science students.
Witch Quack
03/10/2009
In a classic scene from the Monty Python movie, “The Holy Grail”, villages use their own brand of logic to try to prove a young woman is a witch. It goes something like this:
l if a girl burns she is a witch
l wood burns
l wood floats
l ducks float
l something that weighs the same as a duck must be wood
The girl in the scene then had the misfortune of being found to weigh the same as a duck.
In Professor Pletch's Discrete Math class students recently
completed a component on set theory and logic. Part of the course material
was an introduction to the prolog programming language.
Contact Information:
Department of Computer Science
Faculty Office Building N12
State University of New York New Paltz
1 Hawk Dr.
New Paltz, New York 12561-2443
Phone: (845) 257-3990
Fax: (845) 257-3996
Chairperson: Paul Zuckerman
Information: info@cs.newpaltz.edu