The Role of Intermediaries in the Design Industry. An economical analysis of the arts world

As a former computer science professor and now an insider at one of the biggest industrial software shops in the world, he also has an interesting perspective on the relation between academic computer science and industrial practice. Other topics in our conversation included how programming has changed in recent years, why no design technique can make up for not knowing what youБЂ™re doing, and why NASA might be better off with less-reliable but cheaper software. Seibel: When did you start programming? Norvig: In high school. We had a PDP-8, I think it was, at my high school, and there was a class I tookБЂ”we started in BASIC programming and I went from there. Seibel: What year would that have been? Norvig: I graduated high school in БЂ™74, so it must have been БЂ™72 or БЂ™73. I remember a couple of things, going back to those early days. I remember the teacher trying to teach shuffling of a deck of cards. Her algorithm was, use a random-number generator to pick two locations and then swap them and keep a bit vector that said, these were swapped, and keep going until theyБЂ™re all swapped ...»