The elements of computing systems

Have started reading (and have in fact completed more than half of) The Elements of Computing Systems. The book is more about learning by doing than learning by reading. I have also been completing all of the software projects as I go through various chapters in the book. It's been a great learning experience and I wish I had something like this during my undergrad days. It's must read for all Computer Science students.

Neural Networks

Neural Network is a powerful AI tool used for solving classification and pattern recognition problems. Have been playing with this tool using the open source library FANN.

Splay Trees

Tonite Tanu and Me went out on a walk after we had dinner. While taking the stroll we talked about the computer science concepts related to data structures. One topic in particular that we were talking (arguing) about were binary trees.

After coming home I was just browsing some of the wiki pages pertaining to the binary trees and found a new data structure called Splay tree which is basically a balanced binary tree with an interesting property. The nodes that accessed often are moved to the top of the tree and hence their future access become fast. Interesting I could use this data structure for my work since it could be a good candidate for implementing a software cache.