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Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be? It is an honest question. I really dont know. I am sure he had some great technical in

by mads 10y ago

Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be? It is an honest question. I really dont know. I am sure he had some great technical insights, but I haven't seen anything that would lead me to believe that he was actually a genius coder or engineer.

duaneb 10y ago
Well gates and Allen wrote the original basic interpreter together.
- mads 10y ago
  Someone named "Monte Davidoff" seems to have helped them.
  - duaneb 10y ago
    I was referring to the original Microsoft basic, not basic itself. I can understand the confusion.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
digi_owl 10y ago
Given that he would sit down, read, and annotate, a technical spec, and then grill the reporter during the next day meeting on technical aspects, yeah he was. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
- mads 10y ago
  Yes, he could read a spec and I read this before. Dont get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. I just dont see this particular incident as anything special. Bill Gates didn't actually do anything except annotate the spec and throw some ideas out there.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    > I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. Except you question his technical ability, ignore/excuse evidence of said ability, and call him a narcissist.
    - mads 10y ago
      Yeah well, sorry about that.
  - cma 10y ago
    How about this: > In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou[3] gave an upper bound of (5/3)n. This was improved, thirty years later, to (18/11)n by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough[4] (Chitturi et al., 2009). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting Not easy to have significant algorithmic-complexity results that have stood as an upper bound for 30 years.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      Hey, that's the official name for what I thought of as "aligning a stack of coins". The Google Code Jam qualification round this year included the problem "write a function to report the minimum number of flips necessary to sort a stack of pancakes". I'm not too pleased to see this in the wikipedia page: > The minimum number of flips required to sort any stack of n pancakes has been shown to lie between ~1.07n and 1.63n (exact boundaries: 15n/14 and 18n/11,) but the exact value is not known.
      - thaumasiotes 10y ago
        I read too hastily. Pancake sorting involves sorting pancakes by size using the pancake-flipping operation. The problem at issue was aligning them into the same orientation without regard to size, which is the "more difficult" burnt pancake problem, except that all the pancakes are the same size. I guess for completeness, I should post the solution to the sortless burnt pancake (to me, "coin alignment") problem: Consider a stack of coins, like top-HTTHHTTHTHTTTTTTH-bottom. The number of flips required to align it is equal to the number of transitions from tails to heads or heads to tails as you move through the stack. In the example, we can break the stack conceptually into runs of H TT HH TT H T H TTTTT H, which is 8 transitions. 1. (This number is necessary.) Two adjacent coins which differ in orientation can only be made not to differ by a flip at the position between them. A flip above or below that position in the stack reverses neither or both, which preserves their difference. Stated another way, no flip can reduce the number of transitions in the stack by more than 1. 2. (This number is sufficient.) If you move from the top of the stack down, flipping whenever a transition is encountered, you preserve the invariant that the prefix of the stack above the point you have reached is all aligned. This is one flip per transition, so one flip per transition suffices. If the coins must be aligned to a particular direction, for example heads up, just suffix a coin of that alignment to the bottom of the stack.
tedks 10y ago
He wrote FAT on an airplane. Make of that what you will.
- mads 10y ago
  Sounds very dramatic and something a narcissist would come up with.
  - pjscott 10y ago
    ... Or someone who was understandably proud of having written a basic but serviceable filesystem on an airplane. Please at least consider the boring hypothesis.
- astrange 10y ago
  I'm surprised his battery lasted that long.
  - mamon 10y ago
    I wouldn't be suprised if he had written the whole thing ON PAPER, and then just re-type it to a computer. Also, there is known story that Gates and Allen wrote BASIC compiler for some obscure microprocessor without having access to an actual thing, just paper spec. So they wrote emulator first, then compiler and guess what? when run on the real processor it worked like a charm from first try.
    - mads 10y ago
      Come on..
serge2k 10y ago
Joel Spolsky certainly thinks so http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
wolfgke 10y ago
> Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be? At least there are strong signs: According to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gates&oldid=727000381 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gates&oldid=... "In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent." According to https://www.quora.com/Who-beat-Bill-Gates-in-math-at-Harvard/answer/Alexander-Moreno-1 https://www.quora.com/Who-beat-Bill-Gates-in-math-at-Harvard... "Christos Papadimitriou, one of the absolute top theoretical CS people in the world (almost certainly top 10 active researchers), told his girlfriend at the time that Bill Gates was the smartest person he had ever met. Bill Gates, advised by Papadimitriou, found a bound on a problem that stood for 30 years."

by mads 10y ago

duaneb 10y ago

Well gates and Allen wrote the original basic interpreter together.

mads 10y ago
Someone named "Monte Davidoff" seems to have helped them.
- duaneb 10y ago
  I was referring to the original Microsoft basic, not basic itself. I can understand the confusion.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

digi_owl 10y ago

Given that he would sit down, read, and annotate, a technical spec, and then grill the reporter during the next day meeting on technical aspects, yeah he was. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

mads 10y ago
Yes, he could read a spec and I read this before. Dont get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. I just dont see this particular incident as anything special. Bill Gates didn't actually do anything except annotate the spec and throw some ideas out there.
- serge2k 10y ago
  > I have a lot of respect for both Joel and Bill Gates. Except you question his technical ability, ignore/excuse evidence of said ability, and call him a narcissist.
  - mads 10y ago
    Yeah well, sorry about that.
- cma 10y ago
  How about this: > In 1979, Bill Gates and Christos Papadimitriou[3] gave an upper bound of (5/3)n. This was improved, thirty years later, to (18/11)n by a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough[4] (Chitturi et al., 2009). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting Not easy to have significant algorithmic-complexity results that have stood as an upper bound for 30 years.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    Hey, that's the official name for what I thought of as "aligning a stack of coins". The Google Code Jam qualification round this year included the problem "write a function to report the minimum number of flips necessary to sort a stack of pancakes". I'm not too pleased to see this in the wikipedia page: > The minimum number of flips required to sort any stack of n pancakes has been shown to lie between ~1.07n and 1.63n (exact boundaries: 15n/14 and 18n/11,) but the exact value is not known.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      I read too hastily. Pancake sorting involves sorting pancakes by size using the pancake-flipping operation. The problem at issue was aligning them into the same orientation without regard to size, which is the "more difficult" burnt pancake problem, except that all the pancakes are the same size. I guess for completeness, I should post the solution to the sortless burnt pancake (to me, "coin alignment") problem: Consider a stack of coins, like top-HTTHHTTHTHTTTTTTH-bottom. The number of flips required to align it is equal to the number of transitions from tails to heads or heads to tails as you move through the stack. In the example, we can break the stack conceptually into runs of H TT HH TT H T H TTTTT H, which is 8 transitions. 1. (This number is necessary.) Two adjacent coins which differ in orientation can only be made not to differ by a flip at the position between them. A flip above or below that position in the stack reverses neither or both, which preserves their difference. Stated another way, no flip can reduce the number of transitions in the stack by more than 1. 2. (This number is sufficient.) If you move from the top of the stack down, flipping whenever a transition is encountered, you preserve the invariant that the prefix of the stack above the point you have reached is all aligned. This is one flip per transition, so one flip per transition suffices. If the coins must be aligned to a particular direction, for example heads up, just suffix a coin of that alignment to the bottom of the stack.

tedks 10y ago

He wrote FAT on an airplane. Make of that what you will.

mads 10y ago
Sounds very dramatic and something a narcissist would come up with.
- pjscott 10y ago
  ... Or someone who was understandably proud of having written a basic but serviceable filesystem on an airplane. Please at least consider the boring hypothesis.
astrange 10y ago
I'm surprised his battery lasted that long.
- mamon 10y ago
  I wouldn't be suprised if he had written the whole thing ON PAPER, and then just re-type it to a computer. Also, there is known story that Gates and Allen wrote BASIC compiler for some obscure microprocessor without having access to an actual thing, just paper spec. So they wrote emulator first, then compiler and guess what? when run on the real processor it worked like a charm from first try.
  - mads 10y ago
    Come on..

serge2k 10y ago

Joel Spolsky certainly thinks so http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

wolfgke 10y ago

> Was Gates actually the technical wizard that he has been made out to be? At least there are strong signs: According to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gates&oldid=727000381 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Gates&oldid=... "In his sophomore year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent." According to https://www.quora.com/Who-beat-Bill-Gates-in-math-at-Harvard/answer/Alexander-Moreno-1 https://www.quora.com/Who-beat-Bill-Gates-in-math-at-Harvard... "Christos Papadimitriou, one of the absolute top theoretical CS people in the world (almost certainly top 10 active researchers), told his girlfriend at the time that Bill Gates was the smartest person he had ever met. Bill Gates, advised by Papadimitriou, found a bound on a problem that stood for 30 years."