The 1987 recipient of the Steven A. Coons Award speaks out on the state of the art in computer graphics and what the future can bring the industry under the right influences.
Software Engineering and Programming Languages
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The art and science of visualizing data
"I manipulate the laser," the artist said, having exploited laboratory equipment. "This is a parallel pipeline systolic SIMD engine we call the 'Jell-O Engine,'" the animator/straight man announced, but not until he had decimated the practice of ray tracing. And officials from supercomputer centers declared the visualization of scientific data would define a new field, a revolutionary way of doing science.
A comparison of recently proposed parallel text search methods to alternative available search strategies that use serial processing machines suggests parallel methods do not provide large-scale gains in either retrieval effectiveness or efficiency.
Anatomy of a compact user interface development tool
Many contemporary user oriented applications require a combination of attributes from both window and forms management systems. PANES was developed as a tool to fill this niche by providing a simple, yet flexible tool for both the moderately trained, as well as the more sophisticated programmer, while allowing the development of user friendly, modeless application software.
Central-processing-unit schedulers have traditionally allocated resources fairly among processes. By contrast, a fair Share scheduler allocates resources so that users get their fair machine share over a long period.
A view of the origins and development of Prolog
Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
Parlog86 and the dining logicians
A classic problem in concurrent programming is that of the "dining philosophers" which challenges the power of any aspiring concurrent program language. Recently, a growing number of logic programming languages have been refined to handle concurrent programming, one in particular is Parlog86.
The early years of logic programming
This firsthand recollection of those early days of logic programming traces the shared influences and inspirations that connected Edinburgh, Scotland, and Marseilles, France.
Variations on UNIX for parallel-processing computers
Porting a familiar UNIX environment to today's parallel-processing computers is challenging, but options abound.
The duality of database structures and design techniques
Attempting to pair database structures with database design techniques that seem incompatible yields some fascinating concepts about the world of database, including foreign keys and multiple relationships.
Self-organizing search lists using probabilistic back-pointers
A class of algorithms is presented for maintaining self-organizing sequential search lists, where the only permutation applied is to move the accessed record of each search some distance towards the front of the list. During searches, these algorithms retain a back-pointer to a previous probed record in order to determine the destination of the accessed record's eventual move. The back-pointer does not traverse the list, but rather it is advanced occasionally to point to the record just probed by the search algorithm. This avoids the cost of a second traversal through a significant portion of the list, which may be a significant savings when each record access may require a new page to be brought into primary memory. Probabilistic functions for deciding when to advance the pointer are presented and analyzed. These functions demonstrate average case complexities of measures such as asymptotic cost and convergence, similar to some of the more common list update algorithms in the literature. In cases where the accessed record is moved forward a distance proportional to the distance to the front of the list, the use of these functions may save up to 50 percent of the time required for permuting the list.
Economies of scale in computing: Grosch’s law revisited
Does Grosch's law apply in the 1980s? A look at the price and performance of computer systems concludes that there are no economies of scale in computing. Computer technology is characterized by constant returns to scale, a fact that has important implications on future centralization/decentralization decisions.
A proposed solution to the problem of levels in error-message generation
A simple "lets talk about it" strategy is developed that enables users to explore lower level error messages through dialogue.
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