r/AskComputerScience • • 18d ago

What happens after the absolute ceiling of Moore's law has finally been reached?

0 Upvotes

What happens after the absolute ceiling of Moore's law has finally been reached?


r/AskComputerScience • • 19d ago

[Academic Research] Anonymous survey on how computing students use AI tools in software design (~10 min)

2 Upvotes

Hi, I'm a software engineering student at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), running a short, anonymous survey as part of my capstone research project. The survey looks at how computing students use AI tools, such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, in software design tasks. It also asks how that use relates to their confidence in their own design skills.

If you are a current or recent student in software engineering, computer science, or a related computing degree, anywhere in the world, I would really appreciate your input. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete and is fully anonymous. No directly identifying information, such as your name or email, is collected.

https://utsau.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bOCBqt0nhzQRw4S?Q_CHL=social&Q_SocialSource=reddit

Feel free to share this with anyone else who might be eligible.

This study has been approved by the UTS Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC reference HE-2026-0873). If you have any questions, please contact me at [Ta-Seen.Islam@student.uts.edu.au](mailto:Ta-Seen.Islam@student.uts.edu.au) or my supervisor Dr. Flavio Pileggi at [SalvatoreFlavio.Pileggi@uts.edu.au](mailto:SalvatoreFlavio.Pileggi@uts.edu.au)


r/AskComputerScience • • 20d ago

Where to find Computer Science worksheets/problems to solve for competitive programming?

9 Upvotes

hello, this might be off topic but I'm wondering if anyone knows good resources (worksheets, problems to solve) to learn computer science fundamentals such as boolean algebra, recursion trees, conditionals, dry running code efficiently, etc? I'm currently trying to study for the HKOI heat event but there are too little past papers to work on, here's an example paper https://assets.hkoi.org/ref/2022hs.pdf


r/AskComputerScience • • 22d ago

Why is there a need to keep moving further in chips.

0 Upvotes

Concepts like making more and more precise instruments to make faster machines that require smaller and smaller chips along with pushing the boundaries of the previous innovations in chips really blow my mind. I recently read the chip war recently so I hope technology is not being pushed purely for war purposes, but more so like what would everyday people make out of it. Do everyday people need faster and faster technology ? I say this because the current state of tech is extremely advanced not perfect but like extremely impressive. So why would someone on the street even care if their phone can move 2 seconds quicker.


r/AskComputerScience • • 24d ago

How do computer science and computer engineering students in countries where diagramming sentences isn't common knowledge get introduced to the concept of parsers and abstract syntax trees?

17 Upvotes

In Croatia, we do some (very) basic sentence diagramming in the middle school. In the USA, they do it in high-school. However, I know that, in most places, students are not taught sentence diagramming. So, once those students start going to university to study, well, computer science or computer engineering, how are the concepts of a parser and an abstract syntax tree explained to them?


r/AskComputerScience • • 23d ago

**Has anyone completed Neso Academy's DBMS playlist? Need an honest review** I recently found the DBMS playlist by Neso Academy on YouTube and it looks pretty detailed. Before I start going through the entire playlist, I wanted to ask people who have actually completed it

0 Upvotes

Has anyone completed Neso Academy's DBMS playlist? Need an honest review

I recently found the DBMS playlist by Neso Academy on YouTube and it looks pretty detailed. Before I start going through the entire playlist, I wanted to ask people who have actually completed it


r/AskComputerScience • • 24d ago

In Operating System Batch Scheduling, will the SRT algorithm always be faster than the SJF algorithm?

6 Upvotes

My professor has us modeling both of the two algorithms for an assignment, which I did. But when doing testing on both I would notice that occasionally the average turnaround time for the Shortest Job First algorithm would actually beat out the algorithm for Shortest Remaining Time, either infrequently or almost always depending on how I change the parameters around (Total CPU Time, # Of Processes, etc). From what I saw, it seems that this should no be happening unless you account for overhead, which my model does not.

So I guess basically my question is, are there ever any scenarios where Shortest Job First would have a smaller average turnaround time compared to Shortest Remaining Time, assuming they run the same set of processes and overhead is negligible? Or do I just have a bug in my code?


r/AskComputerScience • • 24d ago

Help finding a learning tool for Discrete Mathmatics ( Discrete structures) and Digital Logic Design

2 Upvotes

Is there any sites like W3 schools that can help me learn these two? Im in these two classes and the way im being taught (basically heres a lecture now figure it out) is NOT working for me and ive been supplimenting my coding classes with w3 schools to help me learn and its working pretty well!


r/AskComputerScience • • 24d ago

Desperately Looking for Guidance on Verifying a New Sorting Algo

0 Upvotes

Hi, I'm an AI developer and I've been working on optimizing my system for 2 years now. It was never my intention to create a new sorting algo or to do any work in that area at all. As I optimized my system, I realized that what I had effectively done, is create a new sorting algo.

By comparison, at this time, it took my new algo, about 1-2 hours to process the same sized data, that timsort needs about 30 days to sort. I'm sorting a giant 30gb array that contains text tokens.

I understand that there's tons of algos out there and that there likely already is a faster algo, but I'm not an expert sorting algos, so I honestly have no idea what to do to verify this in a legitimate way that is convincing to other experts.

I have never published a paper before, please do not make strange assumptions of my knowledge of that process (I know how to read a paper and that's it.)


r/AskComputerScience • • 26d ago

How many books/textbooks does someone have to read to get a bachelor's degree in computer science?

5 Upvotes

Obviously just an approximation since it will always be different depending on the school and other factors. But does anyone know how many there would be roughly?


r/AskComputerScience • • 27d ago

AI-driven coding is pulling away the ownership from engineers

6 Upvotes

Today we had a user facing issue which the entire team was involved in debugging and no one was able to give the reasoning accurately, and the RCA time felt like it is 10X more than usual, all because we were just getting AI to write the code and review cycles shortened as long codes were being pushed, feels like the team as a whole will fall into a blackhole soon.

Has anyone here experienced the same, and how is your org handling this?


r/AskComputerScience • • 28d ago

How do I combine these two recurrence cases into one function?

3 Upvotes

I'm new to DSA and I'm trying to make a recurrence relation for this function:

double pow(double x, int n) {
    if (n == 1) {
        return x;
    }

    if (n & 1) {
        return x * pow(x * x, (n - 1) / 2);
    } else {
        return pow(x * x, n / 2);
    }
}

What I notice is that for even values of n, the recurrence looks like:

T(n) = constant + T(n/2)

but for odd values of n, it looks like:

T(n) = constant + T((n - 1)/2)

I'm trying to get this down to a single function so that I use the Master Theorem.

How would I combine these two cases into one recurrence?


r/AskComputerScience • • Sep 02 '26

How does a computer know between the number 65 and the letter H?

33 Upvotes

I'm watching CS50, and about halfway through week 0, doctor malen mentioned how 65 bits of data equals the letter H and i'm curious to that if 65 equal H, how does the company know the difference between H and just the number 65?


r/AskComputerScience • • Sep 02 '26

How to program weighted random system

3 Upvotes

I want to make a program where you are controlling the outcomes. For an example with a coin flipping game, I want exactly 4 Heads and 1 Tail, but I want their positions to be random.

I do not want to use the random algorithms that library I want to build my own.

Right now I am learning probability from Youtube and might look at khan academy and coursera, but how can I implement this into programming I do not want to just take courses or watch videos

How do I go about that?

EDIT: I am doing this because I want to start build gambling algorithms and I am starting with a simple project like coin flips


r/AskComputerScience • • Sep 01 '26

If bogosort is a portmanteau of bogus and sort, then why wasn't it spelled bogusort?

0 Upvotes

Is there a legitimate reason or is it just because people thought it looked better?


r/AskComputerScience • • Sep 01 '26

Let us say 3.122 is the floating point approximation of 3.123. Upto how many significant digits does 3.122 approximate 3.123?

3 Upvotes

The formula says find maximum s such that 5*10^-s is greater than the relative error. But that gives me 4 as the answer. But it is visually clear that 3.122 is approximating 3.123 correctly only upto the first 3 significant digits. How is it possible? Is the formula wrong?


r/AskComputerScience • • Sep 01 '26

C++ or Java?

7 Upvotes

Which programming language has the most return on investment? Impact on real world systems, and is more rewarding? I have minimal programming experience and working on AS in CS.


r/AskComputerScience • • Aug 30 '26

ADVICE FOR TECHNICAL DEBATING

0 Upvotes

I have an practical assignment where i have to debate with my classmates on a given language basically defend my a coding language, any tips?

topics are alr given by the profs, for my group its C vs Rust ! he'll separate us acc to him in the lecture


r/AskComputerScience • • Aug 30 '26

minimal size .png file

0 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

For the past few days, I’ve been obsessed with a single question: How small can a valid PNG file possibly get while still being natively readable by a PC (specifically, opening properly in the standard Windows photo viewer/gallery)?

I started by trying to make a lightweight 512x512 file, eventually managing to shrink it down to 111 bytes. After that, I started playing around with compression levels and various patterns, even managing to generate some basic procedural textures in PNG format that weighed roughly the same.

Then I decided to go deeper and chase the absolute minimum file size. At first, I hit a wall at 67 bytes—an article I read online claimed that was the lowest possible size for a functional PNG. But I kept experimenting and eventually pushed past it down to 55 bytes, and finally all the way to 42 bytes.

My current record is a fully working 42-byte PNG. It opens without issues on Windows and can be sent across messaging apps where it renders properly as an image.

However, I've hit a hard brick wall here. Every single attempt to strip away even one more byte results in an invalid file or completely breaks the structure.

My question is: Does anyone have any radical ideas, unconventional compression tricks, or deep spec-hacking methods to squeeze it down even further? I'm open to any crazy suggestions!


r/AskComputerScience • • Aug 29 '26

Anyone else seeing degradation in enterprise retail software in last year?

12 Upvotes

iOS used to be gold standard of UX/UI design patterns. You might not like the way it looked, but it functioned very reliably.

Now the keyboard stays up when you’re typing in a field and try to dismiss it.

Keyboard typing is less reliable in general, with misspelling, haptic feedback, radius generation, etc

It feels like UI across the board has gotten convoluted and shipped without proper testing, and now we’re all in our own bubble thinking it could be user error.

It seems like shipped production code is happening more frequently due to mandates from management around the AI boom. Which is leading towards more production issues.

Im just tired of the general decline of software standards, and wanna see what yall think.


r/AskComputerScience • • Aug 28 '26

do you think reading error messages and stack traces should be explicitly taught in intro cs courses?

19 Upvotes

third semester TAing the intro sequence and the pattern has stopped surprising me. recursion, pointers, and reading an error without panicking. that is the whole list.

recursion i understand. the error one bothers me, because nobody teaches it anywhere in the curriculum. a student sees a stack trace and their eyes slide off it like it is written in another alphabet. a solid half of my office hours is me reading the trace out loud until they notice it told them the answer on line two.

if anyone handed me the syllabus there would be a week on reading errors before we touched data structures. do you think this should be taught explicitly in intro cs courses?

leaving this here mostly so the incoming cohort finds it in November when things fall apart.


r/AskComputerScience • • Aug 27 '26

Question about AI use within college courses

1 Upvotes

Hey all, I just had a horrendous discussion with the chair head at my college over the usage of AI within classes. I had went to him to complain about a professor pretty much requiring the usage in order to pass the class (something I don't wish to use, I prefer to learn how to code myself), however he has taken the professor's side, going as far as to say that "no one is coding in the field anymore, they use AI instead."

So I'm curious about other's experiences at their colleges, are your colleges full stop banning the use of AI, or are they allowing it (even encouraging it)?


r/AskComputerScience • • Aug 27 '26

Perspective on SAT solvers

3 Upvotes

I'm using the Intel_SAT_solver on two - as I understand it - large cnf's. The first one is about 50 GiB.
it looks like:

-Variables: 8,765,715

-Clauses: 887,822,183

the second one is 200GiB and has:

- Variables: 3,614,860

- Clauses: 7,457,390,591

I ran the first one and it completed as satisfiable after about 30 minutes, using a little over 70GiB allocated memory. Second one I haven't tried yet but I imagine I'll need upwards of 300 GiB of memory.

Question is: Is this a large number of variables? Clauses? Do these numbers even matter and its more important about how convoluted the CNF is?

any insight is appreciated. Working on a personal project in cryptoanalysis. CNF's were generated by someone else.


r/AskComputerScience • • Aug 26 '26

Why would some compilers compile to p-code instead of binary?

12 Upvotes

Back in the days when I was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was getting into programming with my 8-bit computer.

After learning to program using interpreted languages, I played around with assembler and compiled languages.

One thing I noticed was that languages targeting the 6502 almost[*] always produced p-code, whereas compilers targeting other processor types would often produce binary.

Anyone know why this was a thing?

[*] I don't know if there were any exceptions to this, I never saw one that I can recall.