Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Seminar
Topic: Stalking the Pesky Processor
Speaker: John Gimbel, Professor of Mathematics, University of
Alaska Fairbanks
Date and time: Friday, July 27 2001, 12:00 noon
Location: CoRE Building, Room CoRE 301A, Rutgers University, Piscataway,
NJ
Lunch will be served.
A problem arises in the design of parallel processors. These
are sets of small computers, known as processors, which are wired together
in a variety of ways. The problem, which will be presented, is identicle
to the following. Suppose we wish to put motion detectors in a house.
These detectors are expensive and we wish to buy as few as possible.
If a detector is placed in a room, it can detect the presence of a person
in that room or any adjacent room. Detectors are wired to a security
office. Given the information from the processors alone, we wish to uniquely
locate the presence of an intruder. In what manner do we place our
detectors?
We will focus our attention on two questions. When is such an
arrangement possible and when it is possible, what bounds exist on the
number of detectors?
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