So I go into Windows Task Manager and see this.

Let me explain why it’s so much. 10 megabytes is the chat functions. The other 90 is the set of animated smileys.

The other day I saw a link to an amusing Flash thing: http://megaswf.com/serve/102223/ It gives a clear demonstration of the essence of genetic (evolutionary) algorithms.

The idea is simple. You need to make a bicycle so it travels as far as possible. The computer knows nothing …

Have you ever thought that the bottleneck in developing anything is the programmer? No matter how fast you type on the keyboard, modern compilers still compile much faster. Few people know that program optimization is not about making programs run quickly on the processor, but about making it comfortable for …

There is good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the party committee of my department has decided that in the 2009/2010 academic year, third-year students will be left without a course on optimization. This is not because the course is difficult or useless to anyone. This …

In the introductory classes for the optimization course, the students and I discuss a question like “When should you start optimizing?” You can often hear the answer attributed to Donald Knuth: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

Usually, this phrase (actually taken out of context) is interpreted this …