Library Puzzle

This assignment is an exercise to get you more familiar with the resources in the library, particularly with the computer indexes available on MELVYL and with the hardcopy indices of most value to computer people. The puzzle was devised by Kevin Karplus, in imitation of puzzles created by Alan Ritch, a librarian at UCSC, who writes and edits the Mind of Melvyl newsletter (affectionately known as MOM), which frequently contains such puzzles.

The puzzle will stretch your MELVYL search skills far beyond the level of competence attained by most students or faculty. We hope that the assignment will make it easier for you to do any necessary library research for your final paper, and the library search skills exercised should also be applicable to other courses and research projects.

Some of the questions below are simple, straightforward exercises of the obvious MELVYL commands, others are puzzle questions requiring ingenuity and perseverance to find the requested information. These library puzzles often appeal to crossword puzzle fanatics.

For each question below, give one or two sentences as an answer---not just the jone word or number the question asked for. Show the search command that found the answer you got, and, perhaps, some commands that you thought should work and didn't. When you get a negative result, show partial solutions (e.g., UCSC doesn't have it, but someone else does, and we have something else by the same author).

All the questions can be answered without visiting the library, since MELVYL is accessible from any terminal on campus. However, you might want to visit McHenry library or the science library to see some of the books and journals that you find.

Catalog database ( CAT and TEN)

1. Does UCSC have the latest edition of The Joy of TeX?

2. What package does The Joy of TeX describe?

3. Give the UCSC call number of a book on ``computer gamesmanship''.

4. Find books or conferences from the last ten years about random graphs. Use the MAIL command to mail the results to yourself. Give the search strategy and the total number you found.

5. How many computer files are catalogued by the UCSC branch of the library? How many of them are more than ten years old? (Note: computer file is a type of format that can be searched for in the FORM index---you may have to use HELP FORM to get the correct abbreviation for the format name.

6. Try to find more than 100 books (or things cataloged as books), all published in the last ten years and all in the UCSC library, that are relevant to CMP 215. Remember that you can find course names and catalog copy on the InfoSlug gopher server. Hint: use TEN and f SU. The tricky part is finding a relevant subject---start with a book or conference that you believe is relevant, display subjects for it, then look for other books with the same subject. A few iterations should converge. You can try keywords from the catalog description, but that may take a little longer to converge.

   I don't want the long list of books, but the search strategy and the number of books you found.

Magazine database ( MAGS)

What percentage of the Ph.D.'s granted in computer science in 1989--90 were to women? Find articles that attempt to explain why there are so few women, and articles explaining what is being done to improve the situation. [Note: this question can be answered entirely from MELVYL, using the stored abstracts.

World-wide web

1. Using Lycos ( http://www.lycos.com), Alta Vista ( http://www.altavista.digital.com), or other Web search engine find the 1994 version of the surveys that the data about women with PhDs in computer science is based on. Note: this question will be much easier if you can get the real name of the survey from the previous question.

2. Find the issue date and city for the Richard Nixon postage stamp. While you're at it, find a quote ``you won't have Dick Nixon to lick around anymore.''

Computer article database ( COMP)

1. Find an article on fast matrix multiplication.

2. How many articles can you find on FPGAs? You should get a list of at least 300.

You figure out what indices to use

The following questions may require hardcopy indices in addition to the computer indices. Please outline your search strategy, and tell us what false leads you followed, as well as how you finally found the solution.

1. How many searches were made from UCSC in the last month for which statistics were available, counting both dedicated terminals and internet access? Note: can get the data from MELVYL, but getting totals of local usage may require some processing of the data. Explaining how to get the numbers will suffice, with extra credit for actually producing them.

2. Find the best article you can on asymptotically fast matrix multiplication. Give the reference and the asymptotic running time.

3. In an early 1980s conference, Ramachandran wrote a paper on driving long lines in a VLSI layout. Find the conference paper and the journal paper that updated it.

4. Find the earliest paper you can that mentions the main ideas in field-programmable gate arrays. Note: there is a pre-1984 paper, but I don't believe that the library has it, nor that normal library search techniques will uncover it. I am curious to find out how far back the ideas can be traced without inside knowledge of the early publication.

   What is the earliest article about FPGAs that you can find in the Design Automation Library CD-ROM?

5. Find a recent paper from Berkeley that cites Bryant's results about multipliers having exponentially large binary decision diagrams. (Hint: first find the full citation for Bryant's paper.)

6. Find out how many books on C or C++ the Stanford Bookstore carries. This search can be done without leaving your workstation. For extra credit, separate the C books from the C++ ones (I believe that this cannot be done using only the library search programs, but should be fairly easy if you know how to use your computer effectively).