nishi@utai.UUCP (11/16/87)
This week's speaker will be Richard Cleve, who has not yet announced his topic. The meeting will be held in GB412 from 2:00-3:00 on Wednesday, November 18. If Richard sends in an abstract, it will be posted here. Otherwise, stop him in the hallway and ask him. (Posted by PR, so don't blame Naomi)
recleve@utai.UUCP (11/17/87)
Overview of tomorrow's talk: We shall review some of the work of Bennett and Landauer on *physical* (in an idealized sense) models of computers (including "billiard-ball" Boolean circuits, and "enzymatic" Turing machines). These models are used to help clarify the role of energy in physical computations (for instance, is there a minimum amount of energy required to physically realize certain computations?). There are also some interesting connections between the notion of a computation as a physical process and the second law of thermodynamics. (These connections lead to the resolution of a "paradox" in the 2nd law which physicists have been trying to resolve since 1871.) No prior knowledge of any physics shall be assumed in the talk.--R.C.
nishi@utai.UUCP (11/24/87)
This week's speaker will be Eugene Amdur; the meeting will be held in GB412 from 2:00-3:00 on Wednesday, November 25. (Gene says...) Right, this is what I am going to talk about: Define knowledge and common knowledge and talk about the muddy children problem to try to give an intuition of what common knowledge is all about. Talk about the two generals problem and give a proof without using knowledge and one using knowledge. And then define a distributed system and what knowledge means in a distributed system. And if there is time I may either talk about Byzantine Agreement and some lower bounds or something else.
ragde@utai.UUCP (11/30/87)
This Wednesday, Prabhakar Ragde (that's me) will be speaking in SF3207 (note the room change; that's the seminar room on the 3rd floor) on "Lower Bounds for Parallel Models of Computation". This is a practice run of my interview talk, and will be a survey concentrating on work that I have been involved in. No technical proofs will be presented. Please be prompt; I intend to start at 14:10, as we have to give up the room at 15:00.