Hashing. After a talk I gave at a department faculty meeting on my computational thinking vision, Danny Sleator came up to tell me that at his home they use a particular hashing function to store away Lego pieces. According to Sleator, they hash on these categories: rectangular thick blocks, other thick (non-rectangular) blocks, thins (of any shape), wedgies, axles, rivets and spacers, fits on axle, ball and socket, and miscellaneous. They even have rules to classify pieces that could fit into more than one category. He said that “Even though this is pretty crude, it saves about a factor of 10 when looking for a piece.” Avrim Blum overheard Danny telling me this story and chimed in to say “At our home, we use a different hash function.”
Sorting. The following story is taken verbatim from an email sent by Roger Dannenberg, a professional trumpeter and computer scientist. “I showed up to a big band gig, and the band leader passed out books with maybe 200 unordered charts and a set list with about 40 titles we were supposed to get out and place in order, ready to play. Everyone else started searching through the stack, pulling out charts one-at-a-time. I decided to sort the 200 charts alphabetically O(N log(N)) and then pull the charts O(M log(N)). I was still sorting when other band members were half-way through their charts, and I started to get some funny looks, but in the end, I finished first. That's computational thinking.”
Do you have some experiences about how you used computational thinking either in your personal life or at work?
[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~CompThink/resources/TheLinkWing.pdf