December 1974 - Vol. 17 No. 12
Features
Computer programming as an art
When Communications of the ACM began publication in 1959, the members of ACM's Editorial Board made the following remark as they described the purposes of ACM's…
Arguments for a moratorium on the construction of a community information utility
In this article the author urges a prudent and decentralized approach to the question of the design and desirability of computerized community information utilities.…
An analytic model of the HASP execution task monitor
The HASP Execution Task Monitor periodically rearranges the OS/360 dispatching chain to give tasks preemptive execution priority in inverse order to that of their cpu…
A comparison of list schedules for parallel processing systems
The problem of scheduling two or more processors to minimize the execution time of a program which consists of a set of partially ordered tasks is studied. Cases where…
Computer generation of gamma random variates with non-integral shape parameters
When the shape parameter, &agr;, is integral, generating gamma random variables with a digital computer is straightforward. There is no simple method for generating gamma…
A graph formulation of a school scheduling algorithm
The problem classically titled “The Examination Schedule Problem” takes various forms in the literature. Most of these formulations can be presented in the…
An exponential method for the solution of systems of ordinary differential equations
An explicit, coupled, single-step method for the numerical solution of initial value problems for systems of ordinary differential equations is presented. The method was…
Algorithm 488: A Gaussian pseudo-random number generator
The algorithm calculates the exact cumulative distribution of the two-sided Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic for samples with few observations. The general problem for which…
A heuristic approach to inductive inference in fact retrieval systems
Heuristic procedures are presented which have been developed to perform inferences by generalizing from available information. The procedures make use of a similarity…