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Questions tagged [reference-request]

Questions requesting papers in the literature on specific, narrow issues.

This tag is for questions requesting papers in the literature on specific, narrow issues.

Avoid broad questions for resources covering an entire field; such questions are off-topic for this site, no matter what tag you use. See this discussion on the meta site for further explanation. Also, avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based (e.g., "What is the best textbook on algorithms?") or that amount to a request for a set of links, as those are also off-topic for this site.

In contrast, questions that ask for references on a narrow issue, where the answer is likely a handful of papers at most, are potentially suitable for this site.

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How not to solve P=NP?

There are lots of attempts at proving either $\mathsf{P} = \mathsf{NP} $ or $\mathsf{P} \neq \mathsf{NP}$, and naturally many people think about the question, having ideas for proving either direction. I know that there are approaches that have been…
Raphael
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What is tail recursion?

I know the general concept of recursion. I came across the concept of tail recursion while studying the quicksort algorithm. In this video of quick sort algorithm from MIT at 18:30 seconds the professor says that this is a tail recursive…
Geek
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Dealing with intractability: NP-complete problems

Assume that I am a programmer and I have an NP-complete problem that I need to solve it. What methods are available to deal with NPC problems? Is there a survey or something similar on this topic?
Anonymous
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Worst case $O(n \ln n)$ in place stable sort?

I am having trouble finding good resources that give a worst case $O(n \ln n)$ in place stable sorting algorithm. Does anyone know of any good resources? Just a reminder, in place means it uses the array passed in and the sorting algorithm is only…
user834
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Finding an $st$-path in a planar graph which is adjacent to the fewest number of faces

I am curious whether the following problems has been studied before, but wasn't able to find any papers about it: Given a planar graph $G$, and two vertices $s$ and $t$, find an $s$-$t$ path $P$ which minimizes the number of distinct faces of…
Joe
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What use are groups, monoids, and rings in database computations?

Why would a company like Twitter be interested in algebraic concepts like groups, monoids and rings? See their repository at github:twitter/algebird. All I could find is: Implementations of Monoids for interesting approximation algorithms, such…
john mangual
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Quantum lambda calculus

Classically, there are 3 popular ways to think about computation: Turing machine, circuits, and lambda-calculus (I use this as a catch all for most functional views). All 3 have been fruitful ways to think about different types of problems, and…
Artem Kaznatcheev
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on "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science"

Dijkstra, in his essay On the cruelty of really teaching computing science, makes the following proposal for an introductory programming course: On the one hand, we teach what looks like the predicate calculus, but we do it very differently from…
Matthew Towers
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Is there an anti-Bloom filter?

A Bloom filter makes it possible to efficiently keep track of whether various values have already been encountered during processing. When there are many data items then a Bloom filter can result in a significant memory saving over a hash table. …
András Salamon
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What does 'true concurrency' mean?

I often hear phrases like 'true concurrency semantics' and 'true concurrency equivalences' without any references. What does those terms mean and why are they important? What are some examples of true concurrency equivalences and what is the need…
Daniil
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Which machine learning algorithms can be used for time series forecasts?

Currently I am playing around with time series forecasts (specifically for Forex). I have seen some scientific papers about echo state networks which are applied to Forex forecast. Are there other good machine learning algorithms for this…
Maecky
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Asymptotics of the number of words in a regular language of given length

For a regular language $L$, let $c_n(L)$ be the number of words in $L$ of length $n$. Using Jordan canonical form (applied to the unannotated transition matrix of some DFA for $L$), one can show that for large enough $n$, $$ c_n(L) = \sum_{i=1}^k…
Yuval Filmus
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Is there a sometimes-efficient algorithm to solve #SAT?

Let $B$ be a boolean formula consisting of the usual AND, OR, and NOT operators and some variables. I would like to count the number of satisfying assignments for $B$. That is, I want to find the number of different assignments of truth values to…
Mark Dominus
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Start learning about Theory of Distributed Systems?

What's the best way that anyone can do to have a good introduction to the theory of distributed system, any books or references, and topics should be covered first and requirements to start learning in this topic.
Sameh K. Mohamed
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Is there a typed SKI calculus?

Most of us know the correspondence between combinatory logic and lambda calculus. But I've never seen (maybe I haven't looked deep enough) the equivalent of "typed combinators", corresponding to the simply typed lambda calculus. Does such thing…
Hugo Sereno Ferreira
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