Basic biological information is stored in strings of nucleic acids (DNA, RNA) or amino acids
(proteins). Teasing out the meaning of these strings is a central problem of modern biology. Matching and
aligning strings brings out their shared characteristics. Although string matching is well-understood in the
edit-distance model, biological strings...
Despite years of research into human computer interaction (HCI), the environments programmers must use for problem-solving today—with separate modes and tools for writing, compiling, testing, visualizing, and debugging— derive their basic structure from historical accident, and take little advantage of HCI research into the cognitive issues of programming. Neglecting these...
One dimensional nonlinear difference equations have been used to model population growth. The standard biological models have the interesting characteristic that
they display global stability if they display local stability. Various researchers have sought
a simple explanation for this agreement of local and global stability. Here, we show that
enveloping...
Although spreadsheets can be argued to be the most widely-used visual programming languages (VPLs) today, most are very limited compared to other VPLs, supporting only p few built-in types and offering only primitive support for code reuse. The inheritance mechanisms of object-oriented programming might seem to offer help for the...
Although spreadsheets can be argued to be the most widely-used end-user programming languages today, they are very limited compared to other programming languages, supporting only a few built-in types and offering only primitive support for code reuse. The inheritance mechanisms of object-oriented programming might seem to offer help for the...
An important issue in engineering education is the availability of laboratory resources for student use. Using a computer network to link geographically distant students with laboratory teaching resources makes expensive and innovative equipment available to more students. At Oregon State University, we provide a working environment where remotely-located students can...
The set of codewords for a standard error-correcting code can be viewed
as subset of the vertices of a hypercube. Two vertices are adjacent in a hypercube exactly when their Hamming distance is 1. A code is a perfect-error-correcting code if no two codewords are adjacent and every non-codeword is...
Brief descriptions of the I/O requirements for four production oceanography programs running at Oregon State University are presented. The applications all rely exclusively on array-oriented, sequential file operations. Persistent files are used for checkpointing and movie making, while temporary files are used to store out-of-core data.
This note briefly discusses some of the classical results of McCulloch and Pitts. It then deals with some current research in neural nets. Several questions about neural nets are shown to be computationally difficult by showing that they are NP-Complete or worse. The size of neural nets necessary to compute...
"Fifty years after the pioneering work of McCulloch and Pitts, the study of neural nets is alive and active. In this paper, I have discussed some of the work that is of current interest to me and my co-workers. I would, perhaps, be remiss if I failed to mention some...