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Computers and elections

Along the twists and turns of this year's presidential campaign trails, computers act as strategic tools that exert a decisive impact on capturing voters' attention. But a National Bureau of Standards study claims that system …

Accuracy, integrity and security in computerized vote-tallying

The following excerpts have been gleaned from a 130-page report of potential inaccuracies and fraud in computerized voting systems. Recent difficulties in automated vote-tallying, including specific legal cases, are detailed  …

Random number generators: good ones are hard to find

Practical and theoretical issues are presented concerning the design, implementation, and use of a good, minimal standard random number generator that will port to virtually all systems.

Characterizing computer performance with a single number

The controversy surrounding single number performance reduction is examined and solutions are suggested through a comparison of measures.

Probabilistic and genetic algorithms in document retrieval

Document retrieval systems are built to provide inquirers with computerized access to relevant documents. Such systems often miss many relevant documents while falsely identifying many non-relevant documents. Here, competing  …

Calendar queues: a fast 0(1) priority queue implementation for the simulation event set problem

A new priority queue implementation for the future event set problem is described in this article. The new implementation is shown experimentally to be O(1) in queue size for the priority increment distributions recently considered …

A subset coloring algorithm and its applications to computer graphics

We consider the following problem: we are given a diagram made up of intersecting circles, where each region is colored either black or white. We wish to display this diagram on a bitmap device, where we are allowed to (i) paint …