• Question: What is the most complicated program you have made and what did it do?

    Asked by ErrorCat to Sergey, Zena on 13 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by , .
    • Photo: Zena Hira

      Zena Hira answered on 13 Jun 2014:

      Well, when I was doing my undergrad in Computer Science we had to participate in the IBM Software Engineering challenge. It means that people from IBM (a big computer company) gave us a problem they had to solve for a client and we had to solve it in 10 days. The problem was about a retail company with lots of shops that sold things and they had to keep track of what was sold, what was coming in the store (new products or more quantities of already existing ones), things that could be damaged, etc. All these should be communicated to a large online database (big space with all the information) that the main company was going to use to see what was going on to the smaller stores. So we thought of having a number of hand held scanning devices in the stores that can keep track of all the items and they can connect to the big database through the internet and update the information

    • Photo: Sergey Lamzin

      Sergey Lamzin answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      As simple as it may sound – count all word occurrences on Wikipedia.

      This is a relatively simple exercise if you were to count the word occurrences in in a 300 page book, you have maybe one thousand unique words, the most frequent word is ‘the’ and appears a little over two thousand times.

      But with such an enormous repository of knowledge like Wikipedia you have over a billion unique words (this includes many languages and spelling mistakes) and the most frequent word (also ‘the’, who may have guessed?) appears over a trillion times.
      It took me two weeks to write the parallel program and roughly one week to run on two supercomputers. The complexity was in the sheer number of things that have to all fit into a computer’s memory.

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