X-Nico

unusual facts about Communications of the ACM



Bot Colony

In an article published in the Communications of the ACM , Robert M. French argues that "the time has come to bid farewell to the Turing test" and that "Attempting to build a machine to pass a no-holds-barred Turing test is not the way forward in AI, regardless of recent advances in computing technology".

Hash function

Donald Knuth notes that Hans Peter Luhn of IBM appears to have been the first to use the concept, in a memo dated January 1953, and that Robert Morris used the term in a survey paper in CACM which elevated the term from technical jargon to formal terminology.

Netscape portable runtime

Thread synchronization loosely depends on monitors as described by C. A. R. Hoare in "Monitors: An operating system structuring concept", Communications of the ACM, 17(10), October 1974 and then formalized by Xerox' Mesa programming language ("Mesa Language Manual", J.G. Mitchell et al., Xerox PARC, CSL-79-3 (Apr 1979)).

Ninety-ninety rule

The rule is attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs and was made popular by Jon Bentley's September 1985 "Programming Pearls" column in Communications of the ACM, in which it was titled the "Rule of Credibility".


see also

Mark Crispin

During that time, he wrote the infamous RFC 748, the only document specifically marked in the RFC index with note date of issue; and a series of Telnet implementations for the Incompatible Timesharing System, WAITS, and TOPS-20 operating systems whose escape behavior was playfully immortalized by Guy Steele in the April 1984 Communications of the ACM as The Telnet Song.

Network model

Charles W. Bachman, The Programmer as Navigator. ACM Turing Award lecture, Communications of the ACM, Volume 16, Issue 11, 1973, pp.