Problem 1
Many writers have warned us that we would soon build autonomous,
intelligent robots, that these robots would become physically and
"mentally" superior to us, and that the robots would eventually tire
of serving their inferiors (i.e., us) and take control of the world.
Last year, Bill Joy, a famous computer scientist, issued this same
warning in a Wired article.
Do you believe this scenario is likely? If so, what can we do realistically to prevent it? If not, why isn't it likely?
Problem 2
Below is a table giving the distances between some cities in New
Jersey. Solve this traveling salesman problem, that is, find the
shortest path that starts in Princeton, visits every other city once,
and ends up back in Princeton. Give the sequence of cities your tour
visits, and the total distance. Explain how you arrived at your
answer (you don't have to follow any kind of fancy algorithm, but we
do want to know what you did).
| Long Branch | New Brunswick | Princeton | Somerville | Trenton | |
| Long Branch | - | 36 | 40 | 48 | 44 |
| New Brunswick | 36 | - | 16 | 12 | 28 |
| Princeton | 40 | 16 | - | 16 | 13 |
| Somerville | 48 | 12 | 16 | - | 29 |
| Trenton | 44 | 28 | 13 | 29 | - |
Problem 3
In technology, a standard is a precise set of properties and
behaviors such that things that meet the standard can interconnect or
operate together, be made by independent suppliers, will behave the
same across different implementations, etc.; common examples include
CD-ROMs, VCR and audio tapes, the layout of alphabetic keys on a
keyboard, and so on.
A standard tells us how to choose among several equally good ways of doing something. For example, "drive on the right side of the road" is a standard because things would be fine if we all drove on the left; we're better off if everybody drives on the same side but either side would work. (Of course, people do drive on the left in some parts of the world.) On the other hand, "don't eat broken glass" isn't a standard since the alternative is obviously bad.
Some standards are de facto: widely used but without being encoded in a law or being sanctioned by some public authority like the American Medical Association. For example, the Microsoft Windows user interface is a de facto standard; so is the file format that Microsoft Word uses to store documents on a hard drive.
Other standards are de jure: they are defined by more than a single company, or by an independent standards body, or by the government, and they often have the force of law (in effect if not in fact). Examples of de jure standards include the size and shape of electric plugs and wall sockets and the associated voltages, the location and properties of the magnetic stripe on credit cards, the way we use numbers to specify shoe sizes, and the fact that we drive on the right side of the road. (Except for credit card mag stripes, different parts of the world have different standards for all of these purposes. This is becoming a bigger and bigger hassle for everybody as world trade and travel increase.)
Of course, many things are not standardized; an irritating example is the keyboard location of unusual characters like \ or ~. These seem to be different on every computer.
We're not looking for deep analyses in the following questions, just some evidence that you've thought about the questions. Be brief.
(a) Think about computers you have known and list five
computer-related things that are apparently de jure standards.
(b) List five things that are clearly not standardized.
(c) Although standards are generally good to have, can you think of
reasons why the existence of a standard can be harmful?