Talk:Common student exercises in computer science

Article Checklist for "Common student exercises in computer science"

Workgroup category or categories	Computers Workgroup [Categories OK]
Article status	Developing article: beyond a stub, but incomplete
Underlinked article?	No
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	Petréa Mitchell 12:36, 29 April 2007 (CDT)

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Well, the style is not really encyclopedia-like but I just couldn't write a serious article on that topic. Feel free to rewrite. --Markus Baumeister 17:12, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

"Scholarly problems..." is not a good name for this topic: you mean this is a list of common problems given to computer science students. I'll rename this in lieu of anything better. --Larry Sanger 17:21, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

Well, "exercise" is not that a good name either. AFAIK these are typically used in a lecture to explain the concept. But admittedly, I couldn't find "Scholary" in any dictionary. --Markus Baumeister 17:30, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

I'd suggest you consult with a computers editor on a good name for the article, Markus. --Larry Sanger 13:57, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

It's really a mixed bag. The eight queens problem is a standard exercise for computer science topic, but others, such as the Byzantine generals problem are research problems. Nancy A. Lynch did some very interesting work on just this problem, obtaining bounds on the communication complexity needed to solve this problem under various restrictions. So far as I know, modeling partially synchronous communications and obtaining good results here is very much an active area of research. Still others, such as the dining philosophers problem are not so much research problems per se, but archetypal examples of classes of problems, and as such play an important role. I'm drawing blank right now on who did this (I can look it up), but the dining philosophers problem was generalized as the "drinking philosophers problem", in the process opening up quite a bit of new territory and leading to new research. Greg Woodhouse 13:35, 10 April 2007 (CDT)