Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Dr Merkel I presume

Congratulations to my good mate, and frequent commenter on this blog,

Dr Rob Merkel

who just received word of his PhD thesis being accepted. No doubt the examiners were won over by his very sexy thesis title:

"Analysis and Enhancements of Adaptive Random Testing".

I invite Rob to post an 80 words or less comment explaining his ground breaking research for all of us. I then invite others to comment on just how much of a geek Dr Merkel really is :)

I would just like to take this opportunity to also point out that Rob, to a far greater extent than me, is a true blue blogaholic, yet still managed to finish his PhD. There is hope for me yet.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Chris, I've gotten quite good at the parent-proof explanation:

Computer programs need to be tested before they are distributed to the end users (in other words, the little people like you). One way to test them is to use random testing, which is the software testing equivalent of letting a barrel of monkeys loose on your program and seeing what happens. My thesis examined how much you could improve the ability to find such bugs as existed in the program by using a smarter approach. One of the key results was, under certain assumptions, you could only improve on the monkeys by a factor of two (that is, you can find problems in half the time the monkeys can).

OK, that was about 120 words, but it'll do...

7/13/2005 04:01:00 PM

 
Blogger macca said...

thanks Rob.

I can assure everyone that no monkeys were harmed during the course of Rob's research :)

7/13/2005 04:05:00 PM

 

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