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An Algorithm for a Better Bookshelf
Drop in at a library, and you’ll likely notice that most shelves aren’t full—librarians leave some empty space on each shelf. That way, when they get new books, they can slot them into place without having to move too many other books.
It’s a simple-enough idea, but one that arises in a host of settings in computer science that involve sorted data, such as an alphabetically ordered census repository, or a list of connections between members of a social network. The new approach will “hopefully open the door to new applications of list labeling in settings where it wasn’t useful before because the cost was infeasible,” said William Kuszmaul, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the researchers who came up with the new algorithm. Get Involved By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
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