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Great Computer Science Papers?
slevin writes "Recently I listened to a talk by Alan Kay who mentioned that many 'new' software ideas had already been discovered decades earlier by computer scientists - but 'nobody reads these great papers anymore.' Over the years I have had the opportunity to read some really great and thought-provoking academic papers in Computer Science and would like to read more, but there are just too many to sort through. I'm wondering what great or seminal papers others have encountered. Since Google has no answers, perhaps we can come up with a list for the rest of the world?"
Often, when you're new to a given domain, there exists a book (on citeseer too...) that covers the domain and express, often better than the original authors, the main ideas.a nnonday/pape r.html
Then, you can use citeseer to see what's new and what's the fashion in the domain.
Anyway, one of the best papers (and oldest) I read give birth to a whole community:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/sh
McCarthy's paper on Lisp: Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine (Part I).
For a refreshing analysis of the paper by Lisp guru Paul Graham (the same guy who proposed the idea of Bayesian anti-spam filtering), see The Roots of Lisp.
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ACM and IEEE are just the places I would look for such papers. The proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM for example are a very good "filter" for the flood of papers on networking.
...but Claude E. Shannon's paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication has changed our outlook on information and communication. The importance of this paper on modern communication cannot be stressed enough, and it is very readable. If I had 10 papers to take to a desert island, surely this one would be on my list (:
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Does anyone know of a website where you can get access to comp sci and comp eng papers and stuff?
Try looking at arxiv.org and CiteSeer.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
Though it has very few entries, and is no longer updated, there are at least two papers in that list that the typical Slashdotter may have heard about: Go To Statement Considered Harmful, by Dijkstra, and Reflections on Trusting Trust, by Ken Thompson.
The remaining ACM Classics of the Month are here.
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As a PhD student, I often have to look for papers in the computer science field ; and very often, CiteSeer yields better results - or, rather, different results, but with a very good cross-referencing system. You can directly jump to the other papers cited by the paper you're reading, and you can see which papers did cite it, too.
The URL :
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
That said, I often find very interesting ideas in scientific papers, but sometimes things can't be implemented with current technology (I'm still talking about computer science domain, since that's what I know), or sometimes, the good idea in the paper is obsoleted a few years later.
For instance, I remember a scheduling algorithm to read disk blocks in a Video-On-Demand server : it was maybe very clever when it was written, when they had to feed 155 Mbps with a computer having 16 MB of RAM, but today, you have maybe 10 times more throughput, but 100 times more RAM - so you can use simpler, memory-hungry, buffering methods.
The problem is, that it's difficult (IMHO) to say "OK, this paper is theoretically interesting, but we can't implement this today, BUT we will probably be able to do it in a few (dozen) years", because you don't know what will and won't evolve (in my previous example, it was easy to predict that network bandwidth and memory size would increase, but it was maybe harder to guess that MPEG4 and DivX would allow the bitrate of a video stream to stay low...)
Since nobody who seems to have actually read any computer science papers has posted, here are two that immediately come to my mind.
:)
Vannevar Bush. As We May Think. Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945.
This paper put forth the very first ideas about how people can mechanically search for information. While we don't have desks with levers on them, we do have Google.
Tim Berners Lee. Information Management: A Proposal. 1989.
This paper is where Tim Berners Lee proposes what we now know as the world wide web. It's an interesting read if you'd like to see what the original intent of the web was so that you can compare it to what we have today.
A place to look for good old computer science papers is in older issues of Communications of the ACM. There are lots of articles in plain English that you may find of interest. If you are a university student, your school may have a subscription to the ACM Digital Library. If they do, you can read all the issues back to 1958.
Also, you can find a lot of interesting CS publications at Citeseer. They have a page with the top 200 most accessed papers of all times. When I skimmed through it, I saw quite a few titles that may be of interest.
In the section titled GENERIC STRUCTURE, HIERARCHIES , Sutherland describes how he restructured SKETCHPAD in what we would immediately recognize as an OO manner:
Later in the section DEMONSTRATIVE LANGUAGE we see what we might call today the association of classes with methods as Sutherland notes:
I think you mean "The Calculi of Lambda Conversion" , or are they two different things?
Interestingly enough, the Luftwaffe was very careful with its settings documents and its discipline for changing rotors. Bletchley Park never solved the Luftwaffe version of Enigma.
What a bunch of bullox! The following are excerpted from "The Ultra Secret" which was written by F. W. Winterbotham who worked closely with Allen Turing and the rest of his team at Bletchly Park throughout the war.
"Although the well-guarded Kriegsmarine messages could not be deciphered, BP was regularly eavesdropping on the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe was particularly negligent in applying appropriate safeguards to their Enigma-coded messages, perhaps due to a measure of arrogance evident in World War II "fly-boys." Through this source the British were able to piece together Hitler's plans for the cross-channel invasion, dubbed Seelowe (Sealion). Before it could be accomplished, the RAF would have to be neutralized. Warned beforehand of Luftwaffe bombing raids on airfields, designed to eliminate not only the fields themselves but also destroy RAF fighters on the ground, British planes were able to avoid being caught as sitting ducks. Although Ultra intelligence forewarned of impending attacks, coastal radar (underestimated by the Germans) was able to pinpoint flights of incoming enemy planes."
"The British were regularly reading Luftwaffe messages, Of particular interest were messages from the Fliegerverbindungoffiziere, or "Flivos", liaison officers responsible for coordinating air and ground operations The all important Kriegsmarine signals ("Dolphin") were still a mystery. U-33, on a mission to sow mines in the Firth of Clyde, was depth charged and forced to the surface on Feb 12, 1940 by minesweeper HMS Gleaner."
"One of the first relied on German operators using some easily remembered sequence of letters as rotor starting positions. There were identified as "Cillies", after one operator who frequently used "Cilly", his girlfriend's name."
Obviously you were misinformed about your chosen subject. The Kriegsmarine messages were the really tough ones to crack because they were disciplined about transmission lengths, randomized key rotor selections for each message, and distribution of code books which contained the key sequences that would be used in a particular month. By comparison the Luftwaffe operators used their girlfriend's initials as rotor settings and changed keys only infrequently.
Here is a neat site that I found (yep, using Google):
Great Papers in Computer Science:
http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/~chen/GreatPapers.html
I kept trying to put the TOC from the site in this comment, but Slashdot kept saying that the line length was too short. Since it was just plain text, I do not understand what was going on with that. So sorry, but the link really is worth checking out. Good reading!