John MacCormick

Every day, we use our computers to perform remarkable feats. A simple web search picks out a handful of relevant needles from the world's biggest haystack: the billions of pages on the World Wide Web. Uploading a photo to Facebook transmits millions of pieces of information over numerous error-prone network links, yet somehow a perfect copy of the photo arrives intact. Without even knowing it, we use public-key cryptography to transmit secret information like credit card numbers; and we use digital signatures to verify the identity of the websites we visit. How do our computers perform these tasks with such ease? This is the first book to answer that question in language anyone can understand, revealing the extraordinary ideas that power our PCs, laptops, and smartphones. Using vivid examples, John MacCormick explains the fundamental "tricks" behind nine types of computer algorithms, including artificial intelligence (where we learn about the "nearest neighbor trick" and "twenty questions trick"), Google's famous PageRank algorithm (which uses the "random surfer trick"), data compression, error correction, and much more. These revolutionary algorithms have changed our world: this book unlocks their secrets, and lays bare the incredible ideas that our computers use every day.

The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future

A Practical Guide to the Theory of Computation

What Can Be Computed?

Born in Glasgow in 1904, Dr John MacCormick studied law at Glasgow University and was one of the chief founding members of the National Party of Scotland in 1928 and, with the merger of the NPS and the Scottish Party, of the Scottish National Party in 1934. In 1942, he left the SNP and was instrumental in the forming the Scottish Convention which went on to produce the Scottish Covenant in 1949, upon which nearly two million signatures of support for a Scottish parliament were obtained.After a high-profile trip to the US and Canada to present Scotland's case for Home Rule he was voted Lord Rector at Glasgow University. During his stint in this position he became involved in the plot to steal the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey before going on to publish "The Flag in the Wind" in 1955. With a new introduction by the author's son, this updated edition of John MacCormick's seminal work examines the early years of the twentieth-century Nationalist movement in Scotland, providing an invaluable insight into people and events that help create and then shape the SNP and its campaign to secure a devolved Scottish Assembly.

The Story of the National Movement in Scotland

The Flag in the Wind

A central problem in computer vision is to track objects as they move and deform in a video sequence. Stochastic algorithms -- in particular, particle filters and the Condensation algorithm -- have dramatically enhanced the state of the art for such visual tracking problems in recent years. This book presents a unified framework for visual tracking using particle filters, including the new technique of partitioned sampling which can alleviate the "curse of dimensionality" suffered by standard particle filters. The book also introduces the notion of contour likelihood: a collection of models for assessing object shape, colour and motion, which are derived from the statistical properties of image features. Because of their statistical nature, contour likelihoods are ideal for use in stochastic algorithms. A unifying theme of the book is the use of statistics and probability, which enable the final output of the algorithms presented to be interpreted as the computer's "belief" about the state of the world. The book will be of use and interest to students, researchers and practitioners in computer vision, and assumes only an elementary knowledge of probability theory.

Probabilistic Modelling and Stochastic Algorithms for Visual Localisation and Tracking

Stochastic Algorithms for Visual Tracking

An accessible and rigorous textbook for introducing undergraduates to computer science theory What Can Be Computed? is a uniquely accessible yet rigorous introduction to the most profound ideas at the heart of computer science. Crafted specifically for undergraduates who are studying the subject for the first time, and requiring minimal prerequisites, the book focuses on the essential fundamentals of computer science theory and features a practical approach that uses real computer programs (Python and Java) and encourages active experimentation. It is also ideal for self-study and reference. The book covers the standard topics in the theory of computation, including Turing machines and finite automata, universal computation, nondeterminism, Turing and Karp reductions, undecidability, time-complexity classes such as P and NP, and NP-completeness, including the Cook-Levin Theorem. But the book also provides a broader view of computer science and its historical development, with discussions of Turing's original 1936 computing machines, the connections between undecidability and Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and Karp's famous set of twenty-one NP-complete problems. Throughout, the book recasts traditional computer science concepts by considering how computer programs are used to solve real problems. Standard theorems are stated and proven with full mathematical rigor, but motivation and understanding are enhanced by considering concrete implementations. The book's examples and other content allow readers to view demonstrations of—and to experiment with—a wide selection of the topics it covers. The result is an ideal text for an introduction to the theory of computation. An accessible and rigorous introduction to the essential fundamentals of computer science theory, written specifically for undergraduates taking introduction to the theory of computation Features a practical, interactive approach using real computer programs (Python in the text, with forthcoming Java alternatives online) to enhance motivation and understanding Gives equal emphasis to computability and complexity Includes special topics that demonstrate the profound nature of key ideas in the theory of computation Lecture slides and Python programs are available at whatcanbecomputed.com

John MacCormick

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