I haven't written anything on this blog for a while. Honestly I've kind of retired this portion of my blogging web space.
However I'd like to leave this blog entry as the last entry on this blog. Great to see that Stanford University's educational podcast pilot seems to be spreading to other universities. Especially one that is close to my heart, The University of Alberta, Canada, Computing Science department.
Highly recommend Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer's talk on "Chinook The Unbeatable Checkers Program" wonderful insight into almost 20 years of research work and a glimpse into the real-life struggles and victories of academia research.
iTunes Link
One of the more interesting and important points from Dr. Schaeffer's talk he talks about at around 1:22:10 into the talk. There he talks about the most simplest and common of all computing errors:
"... and I learned this lesson long ago. If you have valuable data and you copy it, if you want to keep the data and make sure that you preserve it. You need to check that the copy file is the exactly the same as the original file. ...[When working with as much data as we were] it doesn't take much math to figure out that at least once a month there is a probability of getting a disk error. So I learned that every time I copied a file I would do a comparison of the original file and the resulting file."
Computers, we think are perfect. But they're not.
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