What does ‘predicate’ mean in the context of computer science? [duplicate]

A predicate (‘PRED-i-cat’) is the part of a sentence that contains the verb and tells you something about the subject. For instance, in the sentence “Mike is eating”, we have the subject, ‘Mike’, and the predicate, ‘is eating’. In the context of computer science, we aren’t interested in stating a fact, but rather, in testing … Read more

Significant new inventions in computing since 1980

The Internet itself pre-dates 1980, but the World Wide Web (“distributed hypertext via simple mechanisms”) as proposed and implemented by Tim Berners-Lee started in 1989/90. While the idea of hypertext had existed before (Nelson’s Xanadu had tried to implement a distributed scheme), the WWW was a new approach for implementing a distributed hypertext system. Berners-Lee … Read more

What does the quote “An extra level of indirection solves every problem” mean? [closed]

Generally it means that by increasing the level of abstraction one can make the problem easier to understand/resolve. Be careful with your abstractions though, the full quote at least as I heard it is, “You can solve every problem with another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many levels of indirection”.

What are the differences between NP, NP-Complete and NP-Hard?

I assume that you are looking for intuitive definitions, since the technical definitions require quite some time to understand. First of all, let’s remember a preliminary needed concept to understand those definitions. Decision problem: A problem with a yes or no answer. Now, let us define those complexity classes. P P is a complexity class … Read more